SERMONS 
FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

FREDERICK D.KERSHNER 
MA, LL.D. 



SERMONS 
FOR SPECIAL DAYS 



BY 

FREDERICK D. KERSHNER 

M.A., LL.D. 

PROFESSOR OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE IN DRAKE UNIVERSnT 




NEW ^^iBr YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



o^'^t^-^ 



OQPYRIGHT, 1922, 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COHPANT 



V/ 



X 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



^'> 



g)CI.A661336 






TO 

MY WIFE 



PREFACE 

The discourses which make up this volume have been 
delivered upon numerous occasions, and the oft re- 
peated requests of sympathetic friends have led to 
their final appearance in the present form. The au- 
thor has kept a record of the number of times several 
of them have been given, and in one case, at least, the 
figures run to over three hundred. He can only hope 
that the reception accorded by the readers of the book 
will be as kindly and sympathetic as the hearing given 
its subject matter when presented through the medium 
of the spoken word. 

F. D. K. 
Drake University 

Des Moines 



CONTENTS 



I The Battle of Life 

[A New Year's Sermon] 

II The Man Who Counts .... 
[Lincoln's Day Address] 

III If Washington Returned . 

[A Washington's Birthday Ad- 
dress] 

IV Passion Week Studies .... 

1: Lessons from Gethsemane 

V Passion Week Studies . . 

2: Lessons from the Life of 
Judas 

VI Passion Week Studies . 
3: The Greater Sin 

VII The Eternal Question . 
[An Easter Sermon] 

VIII Ideal Womanhood .... 
[Mother's Day Sermon] 

IX Life Through Death 

[A Sermon for Decoration Day] 

X The Supreme Virtue 

[A Sermon for Flag Day] 



PAGB 
II 



22 



34 



44 



55 



67 



79 



100 



III 



X CONTENTS 

PAGE 

XI The Unread Lessons of Life . . 121 
[A Commencement Sermon] 

XII The Life Worth While . . . 132 
[A Commencement Address] 

XIII The Evolution of National Ideals 151 

[Independence Day Sermon] 

XIV The Modern Worship of Money . 162 

[Labor Day Sermon] 

XV The Death of the Gods . . . . 173 
[An Address for Armistice Day] 

XVI Gratitude True and False . . . 190 
[A Thanksgiving Day Sermon] 

XVII The Problem of Suffering; as Re- 
lated TO THE Incarnation . . 200 
[A Christmas Sermon] 

XVIII The End of the Harvest . . . 212 
[A Sermon for the Last Day of 
the Year] 



S ERMONS 
FOR SPECIAL DAYS 



THE BATTLE OF LIFE 

(A New Year's Sermon) 

TEXT: Rev. 3:21. "To him that overcometh will I grant 
to sit with me in my throne." 

LIFE is one constant battle. From birth to death, 
there is heard the sound of arms and the martial 
tread of battalions. There is no station in society 
nor any form of human activity in which this funda- 
mental truth is not embodied. In the realm of 
physical nature, as well as in the higher sphere of 
mental ambition, and in the still higher circle of moral 
heroism, the situation remains the same. Life in its 
essence means striving, struggle and in the end either 
victory or defeat. 

I. The Battle for Physical Existence. 

The battle begins with the struggle for existence in 
the life of the little child. One disease after another 

[11] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

seeks to crush out the infant ere it has yet attained 
strength to survive. How anxiously the mother 
watches by the bedside of her babe while the breath 
comes and goes, and every moment to her trembling 
heart seems the last. Alas! her child is battling for 
life; simply beginning the first stage of what must 
be the history of its future career. 

The young man, strong in the exuberance of per- 
fect health, is every day conquering the germs of 
disease which are omnipresent in the world. The air 
is filled with a sort of floating tuberculosis and if we 
do not all die from consumption, it is chiefly because 
our physical constitutions are strong enough to fight 
off the insidious malady. Some years ago, the world 
of letters suffered the loss of one of the greatest edu- 
cators of our modern age: Dr. William Rainey 
Harper, the first President of the University of 
Chicago. For many months, Dr. Harper had been 
battling for life with an incurable malady. Even up 
until the last moment, he directed the great work under 
his charge and fought with all the resources of science 
at his command in the hopeless struggle against dis- 
ease. That he should lose the battle was of course 
inevitable, but his heroic defence excited the admiration 
and sympathy of the world. 

It would be easy to multiply similar instances of 
gallant struggle against what may be styled the natural 
foes of the human race. History has unduly empha- 
sised the heroism of another type of warfare, and we 
are accustomed, for the most part, to think of bravery 
only in connection with the roar of cannon and the 

[12] 



THE BATTLE OF LIFE 

shock of conflict upon the battlefield. Physicians and 
nurses, however, will bear testimony to the fact that 
the sublimest type of courage is often manifested in 
the more prosaic battle against disease. Occasionally 
this form of heroism receives its due measure of ap- 
preciation and fame. How breathlessly the American 
people watched the bulletins which told day after day 
of the long struggle for life made by James A. Garfield. 
In the remote corners of the United States, out on the 
prairies, and in little rural hamlets where only one or 
two newspapers were in circulation, the people gathered 
around the village postmaster and listened with atten- 
tion while the details of the President's battle for life 
slowly, and often laboriously, were being read. Simi- 
lar scenes were enacted, though not for so long a time, 
after the shooting of President McKinley. All over 
the country, the news concerning his battle for life 
was eagerly sought after and listened to with tear- 
stained eyes and lips which moved in silent prayer. 
Battling for life — ^yes, even physical life. For, whether 
conscious of it or not every one of us is at every 
moment engaged in a struggle for the very breath he 
or she draws; a struggle which must be kept up until 
death conquers at last. 

II. The Battle for Fame. 

Passing a step higher than the mere plane of physical 
existence, life exhibits a constant battle for fame and 
position. The annals of political history are simply 
the records of the life and death struggle of this man 

[13] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

or the other for power and influence. Every nerve is 
strained, every latent power of body and mind brought 
into play in order that the victory may be won. Aaron 
Burr comes within one vote of supplanting Thomas 
Jefferson as President of the United States; but that 
defeat marks the climax of his career. James G. 
Blaine misses the goal of a lifetime's strenuous activity 
as the result of the chance remark of a comparatively 
obscure clergyman. But, however insdgnificant the 
cause, the fact and sting of defeat remain the same. 
Throughout the world, the tense struggle for fame and 
position is constantly going on with the pendulum 
swinging in one direction or the other. Political heroes 
are elevated and dethroned; and the idol of one hour 
becomes the next hour an object of neglect and scorn. 
Men have endured the most excruciating tortures 
simply to win a name. It is the opinion of the closest 
students of the ill-starred life of John Wilkes Booth, 
that but for this thirst for fame the most tragic crime 
of the nineteenth century would never have been 
committed. 

Much of what passes for a higher motive in the 
national, in the social, nay even perchance in the reli- 
gious realm, is at bottom only a selfish struggle for 
earthly distinction and renown. After all, the goal is 
a low one, for in a few hundreds, or at most a few 
thousands, of years, the fame of the greatest men 
approaches extinction. And what are a few hundred 
or a few thousand years in the timeless stretch of 
eternity? A traveller, wandering through the desert 
sands of Egypt, discovered an enormous statue lying 

[14] 



THE BATTLE OF LIFE 

broken on the ground. Upon the pedestal was in- 
scribed, in hieroglyphics, these words: "Ozymandias, 
King of kings." We have practically no record of 
the career of this particular monarch, and few people 
to-day, even in the circles of the learned, would recog- 
nise his name. Nevertheless, he must have been a 
great man in his own time; a man who had worked 
ahead of all competitors in his own age. To-day, the 
vaunting epitaph upon his statue serves only as a text 
for the poet or the philosopher to illustrate the vanity 
of earthly ambition. There ought to be some higher 
and more lasting goal than fame; and there is. None 
the less in the realm of fame, the victory, such as it is, 
belongs, and belongs alone, to him who overcomes. 

III. The Battle for Heroism. 

Passing to a higher sphere, we reach what may be 
styled the battle for heroism. Here we approach some- 
thing very different from the struggle for fame. The 
true hero is not concerned whether he wins a reputa- 
tion or not; but, he is concerned that the principle for 
which he stands shall triumph. He knows that this 
triumph means, in every case, strenuous struggle and 
battle. A few years ago, on the twenty-third of May, 
I stood in the central square of Florence, Italy, to 
witness the celebration of the anniversary of the death 
of Savonarola, the great Italian reformer. There is 
an iron tablet located, it is said, upon the exact spot 
where a little over four hundred years ago Savonarola 
and his two companion monks were suspended from a 

[15] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

gibbet and burned. On the day of the anniversary, 
the tablet was covered with banks upon banks of flow- 
ers. When, at the behest of the church which has since 
canonised him, Savonarola was led out of the little 
chapel where he had previously undergone the torture 
of the rack, across the platform, in front of the great 
Court Hall of Florence, and then up to the foot of the 
scaffold which like a huge cross stretched out its hide- 
ous arms into the Italian sunlight, I suppose his perse- 
cutors thought that they had put an end to his work. 
But they were mistaken. It is said that as Savonarola 
stood in the shadow of the scaffold and the black-robed 
priest pronounced the words of separation, saying ac- 
cording to the formula, "I separate thee from the 
church militant and triumphant," the hero of Florence 
turned about and replied in words that have justly 
become immortal, "From the church triumphant, — no! 
for the other I do not care." Savonarola was right — 
he belonged to the church triumphant. Out of the 
bitter agony of martyrdom his soul went up to receive 
the crown. He had heard the words of his Master, 
*'To him that overcometh, will I grant to sit with me 
in my throne," and to him was granted the grace to 
overcome. 

IV. The Battle for Individual Character. 

The illustrations thus far given from the transitory 
battles for life, for fame, and for heroism on the part 
of the great and the good of the ages which have gone 
are but the fitting prototypes of our own individual 

[16] 



THE BATTLE OF LIFE 

Struggles toward the goal. Every man and every 
woman is engaged day by day in a ceaseless battle to 
perpetuate the moral life. Temptations of every sort 
surround us; there are siren voices which whisper to 
us that we can relax our energy and still win the goal. 
The young man says to himself, "I will indulge in this 
or the other vice or dissipation and still preserve my 
character" not realising that the victory never belongs 
to the man who surrenders, but always to him who 
overcomes. By and by outside the breastworks of 
reputation, of honour, and of decent fame, he realises, 
when too late, the criminal folly of his career. 

Much harm has been done by under-estimating the 
importance and the danger involved in the struggle for 
character. It has become customary nowadays for peo- 
ple to say "it's all the same any way" — there has come 
to be a sort of merging of the lines between vice and 
virtue in the minds of men and women of our modern 
age; a fatal blindness of soul which lulls them to for- 
getfulness until they awaken and find themselves in 
bondage to this or the other vice ; enslaved to-day, and 
so far as we can see, enslaved forever. It is time for 
us to awaken from this false security and to realise 
that whatever we may say about the harmlessness of 
sin, or however we may apologise for pleasant and 
fair-seeming vices, there is no violation of God's law 
vi^hich does not carry with it its own penalty of bitter- 
ness and tears. "Stolen waters are sweet, And bread 
eaten in secret is pleasant. But he knoweth not that 
the dead are there; That her guests are in the depths 
of Sheol," and many a young man in the bitterness of 

[17] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

physical pain and moral condemnation has realised 
the wisdom of him who wrote these words. The path 
of virtue is not always a bed of roses but it is at any 
rate a highway undimmed by tears, and one which 
grows ever brighter and brighter until it leads into 
the majestic fulness of the perfect day. 

Hence it comes that the supreme teachers and 
sages of the world have always emphasised what may 
be termed "the struggle side" of character-building. 
Always they have taught that life is a battle, that purity 
is not won without a struggle, that nobility carries its 
own scars upon its brow, above all that character itself 
is but the refined gold which flows out of the world's 
forges of temptation and affliction. Only the super- 
ficial and shallow interpreters of reality speak of the 
easy road to virtue. The Supreme Teacher, in his 
greatest recorded sermon, emphasises this lesson in 
the well known parallel between the pathway to life 
and the pathway to death. "Enter ye in," he says, 
"by the narrow gate : for wide is the gate, and broad 
is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many are 
they that enter in thereby. For narrow is the gate, 
and straitened the way, that leadeth unto life, and few 
are they that find it." 

V. The Fate of the Slacker. 

In the battle for character, victory is always possible. 
In the external world, it is sometimes true that circum- 
stances, over which we have no control, prevent us 
from achieving success. In the inner world of char- 

[18] 



THE BATTLE OF LIFE 

acter values however, defeat can come in only one way 
and that is by abject surrender. Occasionally, we find 
men and women playing the part of the slacker, re- 
fusing to fight the battle, and in this way forfeiting 
their right to the crown. The great German poet 
Goethe has pictured the consequences of this attitude 
in Faust. The hero of the drama stumbles and falls 
many times but he is never completely lost because 
he never surrenders to the enemy. There is only one 
unpardonable sin in the universe and that is the sin 
of ceasing to want to be better than you are. 

The young man who chooses to play the part of the 
slacker has chosen the least creditable part in the whole 
drama of existence — the part of the coward. Let him 
be assured, too, that he will always meet the coward's 
fate. Let him not delude himself with the idea that 
he will escape pain or discomfort by ceasing to strive 
for virtue. Everywhere in the universe, the most bitter 
expressions of suifering and agony rise from the hide- 
ous depths of the dens of sin. Life, after all, is much 
like that arrangement of certain of the ancient armies 
which placed behind the soldiers, platoons of their 
comrades armed with whips and swords to lash and, 
if need be, to kill the wretched stragglers who tried to 
steal away from the front. Leave the path of virtue 
because it seems hard and before you are aware the 
biting lash of sin will trace a scarlet mark across your 
cheek, and the iron of public and private condemnation 
will enter your soul, and the cruel rats of conscience 
and remorse will gnaw the peace out of your life 
forever. 

[19] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

VI. The Lesson for the New Year. 

As we enter upon the new year, past experience 
teaches us that struggles and temptations await us. 
It is the part of wisdom to expect them and to be pre- 
pared to meet them. We should enter with optimism 
and cheerfulness, even with enthusiasm and with zest, 
upon the uncharted voyage which lies before us, know- 
ing that if we are courageous and faithful victory must 
be ours in the end. Robert Browning in his some- 
what difficult, and yet fascinatingly vivid, interpreta- 
tion of the theme which is central in this sermon, en- 
titled "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" has 
taught the significance of courage and fidelity even 
under the most unfavourable surroundings. Perhaps 
few of us, during the coming year, will have to face 
discouragements as numerous or as trying as fell to 
the lot of the hero of the poem. In any event, we may 
be assured that like him we can conquer, if we never 
ground arms, and if we keep our place in the ranks, 
always striving, even though the battle be hard, for 
clean, upright, straightforward. Christian character. 

After all, there is no escape from the battle no mat- 
ter how hard we may try to avoid it. It is useless, in 
the spirit of Cain, to rebel against the manifest laws 
which govern our nature. Nor is there anything 
gained by repining or by reproaching destiny or the 
universe because the pathway has not been made easier 
for us. Such an attitude only makes what is hard still 
harder, and closes the road to ultimate happiness and 
success. Little by little, if we are patient and earnest 

[20] 



THE BATTLE OF LIFE 

and true to the ideal which lights the way before us, 
we shall pass through the valley of discouragement and 
enter the glorious highlands of contentment and peace. 
J. G. Holland, our own American poet, has pictured 
the meaning and character of the process in simple but 
unforgetable words : 

"Heaven is not gained at a single bound, 

But we build the ladder by which we rise 
From the lowly earth to the vaulted skies 
And we mount to its summit round by round. 

"I count this thing to be grandly true 

That a noble deed is a step toward God 
Lifting our feet from the common sod 
To a purer air and a higher view. 

"We rise by things that are 'neath our feet 

By what we have mastered of good and gain 
By the pride deposed and the passion slain 
And the vanquished ills which we hourly meet." 



mi 



II- 

THE MAN WHO COUNTS 

(Lincoln's Day Address) 

THE story is told of a gilded youth who, after 
struggling for four years with the vicissitudes 
of college life, ultimately achieved a diploma. Proud 
in the possession of his new distinction he returned to 
the ancestral hearth, which happened to be located on 
a farm in the middle west, jauntily fitted out with an 
English plaid suit, a flashy tie, a large gold-headed 
cane, an eye-glass, and a Turkish cigarette. When his 
father saw him, he turned to a neighbour who was 
standing by and said : "In the language of Aaron in the 
wilderness : *I poured in my gold and out there came 
this calf.' " From the results of personal observation, 
we are inclined to think that the farmer's criticism was 
not entirely without point. The type of individual 
which it portrays is not only formidable in numbers, 
but doubtless possesses distinct utility in certain im- 
portant circles of our modern world. There are social 
functions, centres of popular amusement, and not 
a few more pretentious occasions which would be 
lost without him; and yet I think we will all agree 
that he scarcely represents the highest ideal of educa- 
tional or spiritual ambition. Most of us will concede 

[22] 



THE MAN WHO COUNTS 

that he is likely to be included among those to whom 
the poet referred when he said : 

"For him no minstrel raptures swell 

But living shall forfeit fair renown 
And doubly dying shall go down 

To the vile dust from whence he sprung 
Unwept, unhonored and unsung." 

In attempting to analyse the elements which consti- 
tute genuine success, we discover the one differentiating 
feature to be the presence of some great purpose which 
raises the man who possesses it above the petty level 
of his own individuality, and makes him a sharer in 
God's great work for the elevation of humanity. Some 
one has said that the whole human family may be 
roughly divided into four great classes. These classes 
may be grouped after the following fashion : first, those 
who do not count; second, those who count for little; 
third, those who count in the wrong way ; and fourth, 
those who count for something worth while in the 
right direction. We propose now to discuss these four 
classes in the order named. 

I. The Class Which Does Not Count. 

The first class is perhaps the most numerous of all, 
for the reason that it is the easiest one to enter. It 
takes no special effort to amount to nothing and hence 
the world is crowded with people who fulfil the con- 
ditions required for such a classification. These peo- 
ple do not belong to any one circle or station in society. 
They are not even differentiated by the possession of 
intelligence or natural ability. Some of the most 

[23] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

worthless people with whom I am acquainted have 
brains enough to accomplish almost anything. What 
does differentiate them from their really useful com- 
panions is the possession or lack of possession of some 
consuming ideal for the world's betterment. They 
have not learned the great lesson that in order to save 
one's life, one must be willing to lose it; that what 
really counts is not the nurture of a selfish personality, 
but rather the complete abandonment of self in the 
pursuit of something which is not individual but uni- 
versal Whenever a man can forget himself in the 
pursuit of a supreme ideal, he has started on the path- 
way to real greatness. What counts is the ideal, what 
does not count is the petty glorification of the indi- 
vidual. The man who throws himself with utter 
abandon into the prosecution of some great purpose 
is on the high road to become a man of destiny. He 
has enlisted God and the universe on his side and his 
own greatness is measured by the greatness of his 
task. 

There are certain classes of individuals who specifi- 
cally do not count and cannot count. It may be well to 
group a few of them together in order that the type 
may be clearly discerned. All of them represent the 
embodiment of some selfish feature which does not 
rise beyond the narrow limits of their own personali- 
ties. There is, for example, the incarnation of selfish 
pride, the man whose one ambition appears to be to 
display himself to what he conceives to be the best 
possible advantage. If this desire takes the form of 
personal appearance, we style the individual in ques- 

[2*] 



THE MAN WHO COUNTS 

tion a "dude." To such a being, the cut of his clothes 
or the colour of his necktie is of more significance than 
the triumph of right or the victory of truth over false- 
hood in the world. His gods are the tailor and the 
barber, and the temple in which he worships is the 
drawing-room. He repents in sackcloth and ashes if 
his shoes are not shined, but he is callous as a side of 
sole leather to spots on his soul which the angel 
Gabriel could not wipe off if he worked at the task 
with unintermittent vigour from now until the day of 
judgment. Of such an individual, the most charitable 
comment which one can make is the remark of Portia 
to Nerissa, **God made him therefore let him pass as 
a man." 

Another class which does not count is the class which 
represents the incarnation of selfish ease. The man 
who belongs in this group is the man whose conception 
of heaven is a large armchair with a plush bottom and 
a rest for his feet. The only hell which he can con- 
ceive is a place where for some reason or other he will 
be obliged to work. If he could be assured that there 
will be no coal to shovel in hades, he would willingly 
engage a reservation in some secluded spot in the 
lower world where he could sit down throughout eter- 
nity. His attitude reminds one of the chorus of the 
old negro plantation hymn which used to run "I wish 
I was in heaven a sittin' down, a sittin' down." He 
embodies perhaps the most useless of all forms of 
selfishness, the selfishness of indolence. 

Still another group which does not count is the group 
which represents the incarnation of selfish pleasure. 

[25] 



SERMONS FOE SPECIAL DAYS 

The man who belongs to this group is the man whose 
one ambition in life is "to have a good time." What 
he means by a good time is the limitless gratification 
of his own material pleasures. His one rule of con- 
duct is, "eat, drink and be merry, for to-morrow we 
die." So far as the good of humanity is concerned, 
the sooner to-morrow comes the better it is for the 
world. It is the characteristic of most animals that 
they serve the uses of civilisation more by their death 
than by their life, and this type of animal is no excep- 
tion to the rule. He differs from the other animals, 
however, in this respect that he is of no particular use 
either dead or alive. 

We trust that what has been said will not be re- 
garded as purely caricature. There is no greater 
tragedy conceivable than a wasted and misused life. 
That a being created in the image of God should de- 
liberately, or otherwise, forfeit his heritage, is the 
saddest fact in human history. Whenever such a 
tragedy occurs, in almost every case it is due primarily 
to one cause. This cause is the pursuit of individual 
selfishness. God is the one completely unselfish Being 
in the universe and man has the choice of climbing 
toward him by following the path of an unselfish ideal, 
or of sinking to the level of the brute by pursuing the 
brute's own pathway of incarnate selfishness. During 
the recent war, the vocabulary of the average individual 
was enriched by a number of new words. One of the 
most universally used of these expressions was the 
ignominious term "slacker." The word came into 
general use before conscription was adopted in Eng- 

[26] 



THE MAN WHO COUNTS 

land and was employed to characterise the men who 
refused to volunteer in order to bear their share of 
the great national burden. These men were justly- 
despised for the reason that the cause of freedom or 
of justice made no appeal to them. Their one con- 
cern was to save their own miserable lives, no matter 
how many of their neighbours or townsmen were dying 
in the trenches. The devil characterised them aptly 
when he said, "Skin for skin, all that a man hath will 
he give for his life." The man who prizes his own 
life or ease more than honour, duty or justice is a 
slacker. Moreover, the slacker represents the type of 
man who does not count and never has counted in the 
history of the world. 

II. The Class Which Counts for Little. 

When we turn to the second class of people who 
make up humanity, the class which counts for little, 
we find that what differentiates them from the first 
class is the partial possession of an ideal which goes 
beyond their own selfish personality. The criticism 
which the world passes upon them is that the posses- 
sion of this ideal is only partial. Many of them start 
out well but for -some reason or other they speedily 
fall by the wayside. Here, for example, is a man who 
begins his career with high ideals of service, but after 
a time he becomes engrossed in the affairs of the world 
to such an extent that he loses his early standards. 
There are a number of reasons which may be respon- 
sible for this situation. One of the most common 

[27] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

causes is the simple stress of circumstances. A man 
can so surround himself with selfish conditions that 
he can scarcely escape the poison of their influence. 
It requires constant effort to keep high ideals alive 
even on the part of the best of us, and if we deliber- 
ately neglect the means of fostering them we cannot 
hope to preserve our higher standards. Herein may 
be found one of the great arguments for church affilia- 
tion and attendance. By associating ourselves with 
those who are striving to keep alive the nobler prin- 
ciples of conduct, we make it easier to follow in the 
same pathway. On the other hand, by cutting our- 
selves off from the benefit of these associations, we are 
apt to sink speedily to the lower level. It should never 
be forgotten that men very largely create their own 
environment. If we deliberately choose to foster con- 
ditions which destroy our higher aspirations, we have 
no right to complain when these aspirations disappear. 
Another cause of the loss of the higher motives is 
intellectual scepticism. I knew a young man who be- 
came absolutely valueless, who lost all of his zeal for 
service and his enthusiasm for better things because 
he plunged headlong into a course of sceptical reading 
and had not stability enough to keep his balance. He 
had the making of a great man in him but he lost his 
faith in goodness and in God, and he dropped back 
into a life of nothingness. A man's reading will mould 
his life no less surely than will his actual associates. 
The old idea was that it did not make much difference 
what a boy or girl read, just as the old idea was that 
flies and mosquitoes were innocent creatures bearing a 

[28] 



THE MAN WHO COUNTS 

special commission from the Deity to bite you and thus 
chasten your disposition. .We have learned now, how- 
ever, that the fly and the mosquito got their passports 
crossed, so to speak, and instead of coming from the 
Deity as special harbingers of his grace, their starting- 
point was somewhere else; and yet it is just as reason- 
able to expose a child recklessly to typhoid bearing 
flies or to yellow fever mosquitoes as it is to give him 
thoughtlessly a certain type of literature to read. 
Mosquitoes may poison the body but bad books poison 
the soul. If you want to lose your spiritual and moral 
power, and cut the tendons of the higher life and ulti- 
mately come to amount to nothing in the world, just 
select the wrong kind of reading material and keep 
reading it. 

III. The Class WMch Counts in the Wrong Way. 

We pass now to the third group, the class which 
counts, but which counts in the wrong way. These 
people have learned the lesson that success means the 
pursuit of a great ideal, but they have been unfortu- 
nate in their choice of ideals. They have hitched their 
wagon to a star, as Emerson expressed it, but the star 
turns out to be one of the wandering kind mentioned 
by the Apostle as delusions reserved for "the black- 
ness of darkness forever." Saul of Tarsus started out 
as one of these people but fortunately reversed his life 
before it was too late and thus escaped the rapids. 
Men of this kind are always 'marked out for greatness 
even though it be greatness in the wrong way. The 

[29] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

collapse of modern civilisation in the world war, for 
example, was largely due to the mistaken ideals of 
three men. The first of the three was named Frangois 
Arouet, later styled Voltaire. Voltaire was a man of 
extraordinary brilliancy of intellect who honestly re- 
acted against the hideous superstition which in his day 
masqueraded under the name of Christianity. He 
made his life the embodiment of a protest, a protest 
as mistaken as the thing against which he protested. 
He lived to see himself the idol of the French people 
and at the age of eighty, to receive the plaudits of 
almost the united populace of Paris. There can be no 
question that Voltaire's life counted and that it still 
counts to-day. But it counted in the wrong direction. 
It made France largely a nation of atheists and crippled 
her irreparably in the struggle for existence among the 
peoples. Its influence went beyond France and helped 
to build up that trust in materialism which has been 
the chief source of moral decadence for over a century. 
The second man whose influence has pre-eminently 
moulded thought in Europe in the wrong way was 
Napoleon Bonaparte. Like Voltaire, Napoleon reacted 
against a false system. He became the political idol- 
breaker as Voltaire became the religious iconoclast. 
Like Voltaire, he threw himself into the pursuit of the 
ideal which attracted him, and for this reason climbed 
to the heights of renown. But Napoleon, too, fol- 
lowed a false ideal in the end. He built up for Europe 
the spell of a militaristic empire which has not yet 
passed away. Instead of following the example of 

[30] 



THE MAN WHO COUNTS 

Washington or of Cromwell, he preferred to revive 
the ideals of Caesar, and Europe is paying the price 
to-day. Napoleon's life counted but it counted in the 
wrong direction. It will be a long time before the 
world is entirely free from the baleful influence of his 
programme of blood and iron and ambition. 

The third man whose influence is cursing the world 
to-day was the half -crazed son of a Protestant minister 
of Germany who, disappointed in an early friendship, 
reacted against all idealism and proclaimed his ad- 
herence to the gospel that might makes right and that 
power is the only goal worth while in the world. With 
all his faults, Friedrich Nietzsche was a prophet, 
though a prophet of the wrong kind. His life counted 
and it still counts. His doctrines, perhaps more than 
the teachings of any other one man, helped to furnish 
the intellectual basis of modern German materialism. 
To Voltaire who helped to destroy religion, to Napo- 
leon who aimed to substitute the glitter of a military 
aristocracy for genuine democracy, and to Nietzsche 
who sapped the foundations of moral idealism and of 
altruism and substituted for them a gospel of ruthless 
physical force, the world to-day owes chiefly the dis- 
ease of hatred and of strife which threatens the very 
existence of civilisation. The political, the moral and 
the religious elements constitute the framework of the 
social order. Napoleon attacked the political, Niet- 
zsche the moral, and Voltaire the religious; and the 
three together have come very near wiping out the 
whole structure of human society. 

[31] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

IV. The Class Which Counts in the Right Way. 

It is a relief to turn to the final group of people 
who make up the universe — the class which counts and 
which counts in the right direction. These are the 
people who have chosen a really noble ideal and have 
devoted their lives to its service. It is to such souls 
that the poet referred when he said: 

"There are loyal hearts, there are spirits brave. 
There are souls that are pure and true ; 

Then give to the vi^orld the best you have. 
And the best will come back to you. 

Give love, and love to your heart will flow, 
A strength in your utmost need; 

Have faith, and a score of hearts will show 
Their faith in your word and deed.'' 

Men of this kind count and they count for what is 
highest and noblest and best in the world. Paul of 
Tarsus was essentially one of this group. His whole 
life was simply the incarnation of a sublime ideal, an 
ideal which consumed all thoughts of self and of 
selfish ambition. Among those who belong in the 
same category were Francis of Assisi, Savonarola, 
Martin Luther, Joan of Arc, Oliver Cromwell, David 
Livingstone, Frances Willard, and scores of others. 
It was characteristic of all of these great figures that 
they reckoned not their own lives as being of special 
significance in comparison with the prosecution of the 
ideals for which they stood. Hence, their lives counted 
and still count in the onward march of world history. 

There is no figure in the annals of secular life who 
so thoroughly embodies the principle to which we have 

[32] 



The man wiHO counts 

been referring as does Abraham Lincoln. John Drink- 
water, the EngHsh dramatist, has recently portrayed 
the life of this remarkable character in the most com- 
pelling fashion. He shows us a man whose one 
thought and purpose and ambition was to serve the 
highest need of his people and his generation. No 
other figure in American history, not even the immortal 
iWashington, was so completely unselfish, so utterly 
oblivious to personal ambition and personal pleasure, 
as was the hero of Springfield. No other man in mod- 
ern history possessed the capacity for over-looking per- 
sonal slights and discourtesies to the same degfree as 
did Abraham Lincoln. His relations with Stanton 
alone furnish a commentary upon magnanimity which 
can scarcely be duplicated in the world's history. The 
careful student of his state papers, especially the sec- 
ond inaugural address and his speech at Gettysburg, 
will note how thoroughly he subordinates all personal 
considerations to the over-mastering ideal which had 
become the consuming passion of his life. No other 
man in modern life has counted for more than Abra- 
ham Lincoln, and the chief reason for his pre-eminence 
is to be found in the fact above stated. Of him, it 
may be truthfully said that Mark Antony's famous 
panegyric upon Brutus finds complete realisation in 
actual experience : 

"His life was gentle, and the elements 

So mixed in him that nature might stand up 
And say to all the world, this was a man." 



[88] 



Ill 

IF WASHINGTON RETURNED 

(A Washington's Birthday Address) 

IT is said that an Irish usher was approached by a 
young lady at a crowded concert in New York 
City with the request for a seat. ^'Indeed, miss," re- 
plied Pat, "I should be glad to give you a seat but the 
empty ones are all full." When one is looking for 
something new to say about George Washington, he 
is apt to find the empty seats all full. Shades of 
Fourth of July and twenty-second of February ora- 
tions in countless numbers arise before him and with 
their hollow echoes, mostly hollow, disturb his peace 
of mind. Everything seems to have been said on the 
subject that can be said and perhaps a little more. 
And yet, the life of Washington, like that of every 
other truly great man, possesses a value that is in its 
own way inexhaustible. There is always room for 
one more commentary on Homer, one more essay on 
Shakespeare, one more life of Napoleon. A half mil- 
lion or more sermons a week for over a thousand 
years have not sufficed to exhaust the Bible as a store- 
house of inspiration. All genius is in truth of such 
a miraculous and divine quality that, like the cruse of 
the Shunammite woman, it can never be drained dry. 

[34] 



IF WASHINGTON RETURNED 

The book which you have read through possesses a 
new value when you read it again. The letters seem 
aglow with a new message. The flaming pens of the 
unseen cherubim who are the guardian angels of in- 
spiration have re-written the pages while you were 
asleep. A book that will not stand a third reading is 
not worthy of the first. It is a sin against opportunity 
to read most of the transient literature to-day, and it 
is likewise a criminal waste of time. What is true of 
books is also true of men, for books are but the crys- 
tallised life, the congealed blood, as it were, of their 
authors. 

I. The Return of Washington. 

A good many years ago, Mr. William T. Stead, at 
that time the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette of Lon- 
don, paid a visit to the pork-packing metropolis of the 
universe and speedily poured forth his impressions in 
a volume entitled "If Christ Came to Chicago." Mr. 
Stead was a good newspaper man and he started a 
distinct fad in titles. In a short time, we had books 
entitled 'Tf Christ Came to Congress" and a host of 
other imitations of the kind. Some of these works, 
while pretending to be defenders of virtue, were in 
reality little more than guide books to vice. However 
legitimate the idea may have been when used with 
reference to the founder of Christianity, it is certainly 
worth consideration when applied to the first great 
American. Some years ago in the City of Philadel- 
phia, there was celebrated the bi-centennial of the birth 

[35] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

of Benjamin Franklin, the man who occupies a posi- 
tion perhaps second only to Washington among our 
early heroes. As I recall it, one of the principal fea- 
tures of the celebration was the conferring by the 
University of Pennsylvania, of the degree of Doctor 
of Laws upon His Majesty, King Edward of England. 
They made him Doctor Edward the Seventh. When 
I read the newspaper account, I wondered what Ben 
Franklin would have thought if he could have come 
back to Philadelphia while the celebration was going 
on. It is true that he tried to doctor His Majesty, 
George the Third, but it was in a different way. He 
was over at the Court of France most of the time 
fixing up prescriptions of powder and shot for the 
benefit of His Royal Highness. 

Some time ago I visited the scene of the battle of 
Lexington, the first contest in the war of 1776. They 
told me, reviving memories of my old school history, 
of how the red coats marched out of Boston in the 
dead of night in order to destroy the stores of ammu- 
nition at Concord. As the boatload of soldiers em- 
barked at the foot of Boston Common, the lantern 
swung out of the old North Church and sent its warn- 
ing to the patriots on shore. As I stood there, I saw 
in imagination the sunrise gilding the Massachusetts 
hills, while on all sides were heard the booming of 
guns and the ringing of bells to arouse the people. 
And then, in the quiet village square at Lexington, I 
saw the little band of seventy men from the fields 
assembled on the green in front of the church, without 
breastworks or any special means of defence, to dispute 

[36] 



IF WASHINGTON RETURNED 

the passage of four hundred and fifty regulars of the 
army of King George. On come the red coats, march- 
ing at double quick time, Major Pitcairn on his white 
horse riding before. The seventy men do not falter, 
"Disperse, ye rebels," cries Pitcairn waving aloft his 
sword. There is the silence of death for a moment. 
It is one of those occasions when Time stands still and 
Destiny puts her finger upon her lips. The old church 
is peaceful as the grave. The swallows twitter on the 
roof. The moment passes, and with its passing a new 
era in the history of humanity begins. "Fire,'' roarS 
Pitcairn and the volley heard round the world rings 
out. A third of the seventy fall dead and wounded 
to the ground; the remainder disperse. The soldiers 
of King George fire another volley and give three 
cheers for their victory, while the dying Americans 
writhe upon the grass. Those cheers are heard like- 
wise around the world. Over in Connecticut, they 
waken Israel Putnam from his lethargy; in Vermont, 
they sound like a clarion call to Ethan Allen; in Vir- 
ginia, they tingle through the blood of Washington. 

These things took place less than a century and a 
half ago. If Washington could come back to America 
to-day, what would he say of the nation which had such 
an humble beginning on the village green of Lexington. 
I have no doubt but that he would be very much grati- 
fied at the progress we have made. There were no 
railroads when he was alive, no telegraph or telephone 
lines, to say nothing of the wireless; no steamships, no 
aeroplanes, in fact none of the achievements of modern 
invention and industry. A dozen San Francisco earth- 

[37] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

quakes might have come and gone and we would have 
been none the wiser. Great cities have sprung into 
existence where only the trackless forests stretched 
before. Strange reminiscences would throng his mind 
as he passed along. Where once amid the silence of the 
night and by the flickering light of a single torch, he 
read the funeral service over the dead body of Brad- 
dock, there is now a city of nearly a million inhabitants. 
Instead of the hoot of the owl, there is heard the shriek 
of the locomotive; the forests have become harvest 
fields; the huts of the red men, palaces of brick and 
marble. "A great nation," I can imagine he would 
say, "well worth the blood shed upon Bunker Hill and 
the bitter privations of Valley Forge." 

II. The Criticism of Washington. 

More significant to us perhaps than the commenda- 
tion of Washington, would be his criticism. There 
are certain things in our American life to which, we 
can hardly doubt, he would take exception. One of 
them would be our fawning upon and servile imitation 
of the degenerate aristocracy of other nations. Let a 
decayed duke or a no account count come into the 
United States and he can scarcely get out of the country 
without taking several millions of American money, 
with the millionaire's daughter thrown in as a trivial 
accompaniment. If George Washington saw perhaps 
our most representative metropolitan hotel and by 
chance asked where the owner was, he would be told 
that he was over in Europe begging to be allowed the 

[38] 



IF WASHINGTON RETURNED 

privilege of paying the gambling debts of certain aris- 
tocrats whose ancestors the father of our country 
helped to kick across the Atlantic in 1776 and 1777. 
What do you suppose Washington would have to say 
about such a situation ? I do not know what he would 
say but I feel reasonably sure of what he would think. 
He would think of that scene which took place within 
gunshot of the same hotel a little over a hundred years 
before it was built. He would think of that terrible 
day, the most bitter in his life, when, telescope in hand, 
he watched from the American entrenchments the 
slaughter of Sullivan's troops upon Long Island. 
Again he would see Smallwood's Maryland brigade, 
surrounded by ten times their number, charge in vain 
upon their foes. He would hear the distant shouts of 
triumph ringing over the hills of Flatbush and once 
more in imagination he would drop his telescope and 
cover his face with his hands and cry out, **My God, 
my God, what brave men must I lose to-day!" He 
would think too of the bitter sadness which followed 
the night of the battle; of the long anxious moments 
of suspense and danger while the disheartened troops 
were ferried across the East River; of the delegations 
of women and children who came to him begging him 
to save their city and homes. I am not trying to arouse 
any feeling against Great Britain as a nation or against 
the British people as a people in uttering these words. 
What I am trying to do is to protest with all the 
earnestness of my soul against the miserable snobbish- 
ness which cringes in the dust before foreign titles and 
which apes, at whatever cost, foreign customs. I have 

[39] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

lived in England and I know that no self-respecting 
Englishman would think of being guilty of such a 
treason against his native land; no self-respecting 
Italian would do it; not even a self-respecting Qiina- 
man; and, wherever bom, the man who lives in the 
United States and does it, is not and never was an 
American. 

Another thing which I think would grieve the spirit 
of Washington if he were to come back to his native 
land is the mad materialism of our social and political 
life. We are coming perilously near to the condition 
pictured by the old moralist when he said of a certain 
class that they "lived for the lust of the moment and 
died in the doing of it." One class in our social order 
apes the class just above it, and that one apes the one 
above it, tmtil the highest class in this infamous com- 
petition apes some titled numbskull who sets the 
fashion across the Atlantic. Instead of making our 
social customs — our dress or our habits of life our 
servants as they should be, we have made ourselves 
their slaves. Men toil night and day to keep up a 
certain style of living because somebody else does the 
same thing, and somebody else does the same thing 
because somebody else does it. We wear out our lives 
in this useless competition. It is no discredit not to 
have much money. The wisest, bravest and best of 
the men of earth have been poor — from Homer, who 
was a beggar, to Jesus Christ who owned only a single 
garment when he died. But it is a disgrace which 
ought to sear your very brain to try to imitate some 

[40] 



IF WASHINGTON RETURNED 

one who has more money than you have. You are his 
equal, perhaps his superior, as long as you assert your 
independence, but the minute you begin to imitate him, 
he treats you as what you are; that is, his inferior. 
This is particularly true of dress. If you dress as 
becomes your means, he respects you; in fact, you 
compel his respect. But if you try to ape him, he 
mistakes you, as he has a right, for his footman. One 
of the most admirable things about the character of 
Robert Burns was his independence. He had some 
very serious faults but there was nothing servile about 
him. When the high society of Edinburgh took him 
up as a sort of curiosity and made a great todo over 
him., he never sacrificed his independence by toadying 
before them. He was altogether different from the 
peopl« of the present day whose chief ambition in life 
appears to be to be kicked by somebody who has been 
kicked by somebody who has wandered over the thread- 
bare kingdoms of Europe imploring the nobility to 
kick him. 

There are other things which would cause Wash- 
ington regret but the limits of the present address do 
not permit their mention. Among them might be 
named the enslavement of the people by certain forms 
of corporate wealth, the curtailment and at times the 
destruction of the freedom of the press and of public 
assembly, the enormous centralisation of governmental 
functions, the widespread prevalence of graft and other 
evils which have followed in the wake of our national 
and civic development. 

[41] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

III. Washington and England. 

There is one phase of present-day life in America 
which demands especial attention in any study of the 
life of Washington. This is the changed attitude^ of 
American sentiment toward the English government 
and the English people. Reference has been made to 
the criticism which we must believe the father of his 
country would visit upon those Americans who are 
willing to sacrifice their independence in exchange for 
a titled mess of pottage. While this is true, we can- 
not help feeling also that he would rejoice in the in- 
creasing solidarity of the Anglo-Saxon race. Wash- 
ington was thoroughly English by birth and it was 
only the stubborn folly of a pedantic Hanoverian 
despot which drove him to take up arms against his 
own blood kindred. The fact of the case is that George 
the Third was a great deal more German than he was 
English. In order to enforce his tyrannical dictates 
upon his subjects in America, the half-insane old 
Teuton was fain to employ a considerable body of 
Hessian mercenaries. These Hessians later came to 
grief in much the same fashion as was true of their 
descendants in the recent world war. The real spirit 
of England, that is of the Anglo-Saxon peoples, was 
always sympathetic with Washington. It was only 
extraneous conditions which produced the line of 
cleavage which divided England from America in the 
days of the Revolution. We should all of us rejoice, 
and we feel sure that George Washington would him- 
self rejoice most of all, if he could return, in the 

[42] 



IF WASHINGTON RETURNED 

changed attitude which has come over Anglo-American 
relations. John Drinkwater, the English dramatist, 
who has so admirably interpreted the ideals of Abra- 
ham Lincoln, has likewise brought a message of affec- 
tionate greeting to the descendants of Washington. 
Perhaps no American author has appraised the worth 
of the hero of Mt. Vernon more sympathetically and 
more completely than Englishmen like Drinkwater and 
Bryce. For this recognition, the Father of his Coun- 
try would doubtless be grateful if he could return. In 
the consciousness of unity between the great English- 
speaking nations, he, like other prophets of the dawn, 
would recognise the approach of "that far-off divine 
event toward which the whole of creation moves." 



[«] 



IV 

PASSION WEEK STUDIES 

I : Lessons from Gethsemane 

TEXT; Mark 14:32. "And they came to a place which 
was named Gethsemane." 

THE story of the Scriptures is largely a story of 
gardens. It begins in Genesis with the Garden 
of Eden with its vision of innocence enshrined amid a 
bower of roses and daffodils, and it closes in Revela- 
tion with a picture of the garden of God that shall 
become the Paradise of the redeemed. Humanity, with 
its misery and sin, is bounded on each side by flowers. 
Eden and Paradise are both pictured as gardens, and 
between the regret for the garden that has faded and 
the longing for the garden that is to be revealed lies 
the checkered pathway of the sons of men. 

Midway between the two gardens of the past and 
of the future, we come to another which we all shrink 
from entering. As we read the title over the gate, 
fear and anguish overwhelm us for it is the dreaded 
garden of Gethsemane. Escape it, we cannot for our 
pathway lies straight on. The road has closed behind 
us. On both sides, impassable precipices rear them- 
selves. There is but one path for us and that path is 
through the garden. Ella Wheeler Wilcox has pic- 

[44] 



PASSION WEEK STUDIES 

tured in imforgetable fashion the inevitableness of 
Gethsemane. 

"Down shadowy lanes, across strange streams 
Bridged over by our broken dreams; 
Behind the misty caps of years, 
Beyond the great salt fount of tears, 
The garden lies. Strive as you may, 
You cannot miss it in your way. 
All paths that have been, or shall be. 
Pass somewhere through Gethsemane. 

"All those who journey, soon or late, 
Must pass within the garden's gate ; 
Must kneel alone in darkness there. 
And battle with some fierce despair. 
God pity those who cannot say, 
'Not mine but thine,' who only pray, 
'Let this cup pass,' and cannot see 
The purpose in Gethsemane." 

Gethsemane represents the never-ending struggle 
between the spirit and the flesh, between the higher 
and the lower natures, between the weakness of the 
human and the aspiration toward the divine which is 
characteristic of every step upward in character. 



I. Gethsemane and Human Friendships, 

It is noticeable when we first come to the garden 
that, like the Christ, we have all of our friends with 
us; but as we enter beneath the low-roofed archway, 
we voluntarily elect to leave most of them behind. It 
is said that sorrow loves company, but it is certainly 
true that it does not love too much company. The 
bitter agony which wrings our hearts shrinks from 
the publicity of even the gaze of friendship. Perhaps 

[45] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

most of our friends would not care to go with us any- 
way, for as a rule human ties break when tested by 
misfortune. But even if they desired to enter, we 
would not want them. And yet while this is true of 
the great bulk of those whom we style our friends, 
it is likewise true that there will always be one or two 
or three of those we love best that we will take with 
us into the garden. They are our old and trusted 
acquaintances, those whose devotion we have proved, 
and of whose fidelity we are assured. They are, like 
Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, the men and 
women we have known longest and loved best ; and in 
this hour of bitterness, ''When our souls are exceed- 
ing sorrowful even unto death," we cling to them as 
we have never clung to them before. 

Moreover, our chosen friends are satisfied to watch 
and to do what they can for us even though they can- 
not understand nor appreciate the grief which weighs 
us to the ground. It is a fact as universal as human 
nature itself, that no matter how kind-hearted or sym- 
pathetic we may be, we never thoroughly understand 
the grief of another person nor does any other person 
ever understand our grief. The deepest springs of 
sorrow find their sources in the fountain depths of the 
heart and are never disclosed to the eye of another. 
Men have sometimes said that the longing for sympa- 
thy is sheer weakness, but these men do not them- 
selves escape from it and, like the Nazarene, they will 
always be found eager to lean upon their closest 
friends when the final moment of trial comes. 
Friends — how comforting the word sounds to us! 

[46] 



PASSION WEEK STUDIES 

In our days of gaiety and pleasure, we did not need 
them. On the triumphal march from Bethany with 
the flowers blooming by the roadside and the bright 
sun shining overhead, we could have gotten along 
without them ; but now in this cold drear garden, with 
its twisted and gnarled olive trees, and the sharp flints 
which pierce our feet, to say nothing of the misery 
which weighs upon our hearts, we want friends as we 
have never wanted them before. Gethsemane is bad 
enough with a companion or two to help to ward off 
the spectres that assail us, but Gethsemane alone is 
more than we can bear. So we say, but alas, it must 
be Gethsemane alone. We look around for our com- 
panions only to find that they are all asleep, and then 
the sense of our abandonment comes upon us with 
double severity. They are tired, of course, but are we 
not tired too? And yet can we sleep? If they felt or 
could feel the thousandth part of the bitterness which 
is ours, sleep would be as impossible for them as for 
us. But they do not feel it — the conclusion is forced 
upon us with inevitable certainty — and so we realise 
that our Gethsemane must be borne alone. 

It is said that during the darkest hours of the War 
between the States, a stranger happened accidentally 
to enter the private room of Abraham Lincoln. He 
found the President upon his knees with the tears 
streaming from his eyes. Before the world, Lincoln 
was a man of imperturbable coolness, usually masking 
his thought behind the protecting cover of some criti- 
cism or jest. But Lincoln, we may be assured, had his 

[47] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

Gethsemanes, and we may be assured too that he passed 
through them alone. 

II. The Universality of Gethsemane. 

Of all the lessons in the life of Christ, there is none 
more universal than is the lesson of Gethsemane. On 
the mountain top of Transfiguration, he is raised 
above us and we can scarcely understand the reality of 
his glory. As a worker of miracles, he is divine 
rather than human. In his temptation, even, where 
he seems to descend nearest to our human level, he is 
still so far above us that we despair of understanding 
him; but here in the garden, where the spirit strug- 
gles with the flesh, where he longs for human sym- 
pathy and manifests so much of our own himian na- 
ture, here, it seems to me, he becomes intensely real. 

It will be observed that Jesus experiences the double 
shock of finding the disciples twice asleep in the garden. 
The gospel narratives differ in their interpretation of 
the circumstance. Luke says that they had fallen 
asleep because of sorrow; Mark because their eyes 
were heavy, "neither wist they what to answer him" ; 
Matthew reiterates the statement of Mark. There is 
no real disagreement in the narratives since they por- 
tray only different sides of the same thing. Their 
eyes were heavy because they were tired out with the 
watching of the previous nights of the Passover. 
They were sorrowful and had wept at the sadness of 
their Master — a sadness which they could not under- 
stand and which they could not relieve. Most of all, 

[48] 



PASSION WEEK STUDIES 

I think their feeling is portrayed in the quotation, 
"they wist not what to answer Him," one of the most 
pathetic lines contained in the Scriptures. There is a 
drama sometimes enacted in real life which conveys an 
idea of what that line means. A mother, whose heart 
is wrung with anguish because of the death of her 
husband, is weeping beside her child. The latter, who 
is old enough to realise in a vague way that something 
terrible has happened but who isn't old enough to 
understand what it is, watches her mother's grief in 
silent astonishment. Mother has always stood for 
everything in the way of protection and power to the 
little one and now mother doesn't seem to be able to 
do anything. And so the child wanders off in a cor- 
ner somewhere and doesn't even cry aloud, but in a 
subdued sort of way weeps itself asleep. The disciples 
"wist not what to answer him" — what could they say 
to comfort the Son of God, Himself? It is the inevi- 
table penalty which a great soul must pay for its great- 
ness, that by virtue of being above others it is cut off 
from the consolation of their sympathy. The disci- 
ples could have understood and comforted one of their 
own number, but they could not comfort the Christ. 

And yet, if they had been able to have kept awake, 
which was all that Christ asked of them, how much 
better they would have been prepared for the ordeal 
which awaited them ! There is a lesson in this fact for 
us to-day, the lesson that the mere effort to comfort, the 
effort to render service in any form is the best pos- 
sible preparation for temptation and trial. How often 
do we say that we can do nothing for this or the other 

[49] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

person, and therefore it is useless to attempt anything. 
Peter felt that he could not help the Christ, but with a 
little extra effort he could have kept awake and 
watched with him. If he had done no more than this, 
doubtless in his own turn he would have gained 
strength sufficient to have kept him from denying his 
Master, a few hours later. 

III. The Prayers in Gethsemane^ 

The great lesson of Gethsemane after all is con- 
tained in the prayers uttered by the Christ. Frederick 
W. Robertson was so impressed by the significance of 
these petitions that he based his entire philosophy of 
prayer upon them. Doubtless, this is an extreme view 
of the subject, for there are other prayers mentioned 
in the Bible which must be taken into account in order 
to secure a well-rounded viewpoint, and yet this posi- 
tion is not without justification. 

The first petition is the expression of human weak- 
ness which finds a responsive chord in every soul that 
enters Gethsemane. "Oh my Father if it be possible 
let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless, not as I will, 
but as thou wilt." Jesus knew that all things were 
possible with God; why then could not this last bitter 
cup be taken away without the destruction of the Mes- 
siah's mission to the world? Had he not suffered 
enough as it was? Homeless and friendless, without 
a place to lay his head, patient in season and out of 
season, despised and rejected of men, why might he 
not have been spared the last awful agony of the cross? 

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PASSION WEEK STUDIES 

Had it indeed been possible, there is no doubt but that 
his petition would have been granted. 

How impossible it was, after the lapse of two 
thousand years, we can readily recognise. Without 
Calvary and the resurrection morn, Christianity would 
have been forgotten a few decades after the death of 
its founder. The last bitter cup was all-important 
in the programme of redemption. It set the seal upon 
the work of the Nazarene and enabled him to utter 
those sublime words "It is finished," when nailed to 
the cross. 

There is a story, which is tolerably well authenti- 
cated, to the effect that a French philosopher, who 
lived in the days of the Revolution, devised what he 
thought was a perfect outline of a new religion, one 
that would supersede the old and outworn Christianity. 
He went to the Premier of France, who had no special 
reputation for piety, and presented the outline to him. 
The worldly-wise politician read it and then turned 
to the author and said, "There is only one thing it 
lacks in order that it may equal Christianity. That 
thing is that its author should submit to be scourged, 
beaten and crucified, and after having been buried for 
three days should raise himself from the dead. If 
if you can accomplish this, your religion will be worth 
something." 

Jesus, himself, recognised the necessity for the 
cross in the second portion of his prayer. There is a 
wonderful consolation to us in our moments of weak- 
ness in the thought that even the Christ shrank from 
the cross. Fourteen hundred years after the cruci- 

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fixion, in the market square of Rouen, a nineteen-year- 
old peasant girl was burned alive by a frantic mob 
of English soldiers. When they led her to the funeral 
pyre, she shrank from the flames and cried for water. 
But soon, the moment of weakness was over; the 
Christ who had passed through Gethsemane before 
her threw open the gates of Paradise to her eyes, and 
with one rapturous cry — "J^sus" — she passed to her 
reward. The church, under whose auspices she was 
burned, has since made her a saint and has placed her 
name in the calendar. But for us, the lesson of her 
life is the lesson of Gethsemane, the struggle between 
the flesh and the spirit, and the triumph granted to her 
in the end. 

"Nevertheless, not as I wall but as thou wilt." Be- 
tween the first prayer and the second, the victory is 
already gained. The cry of Jesus is no longer "Let 
this cup pass," but rather "Thy will be done." Before 
His eyes, gifted with prophetic vision, rose a picture 
of the events of the morrow. He saw the trial before 
Pilate, the angry mob surging around him and crying 
"Crucify him! Crucify him!" He felt the crown 
of thorns sink into his brow. He watched the long 
procession take its way toward Calvary. He felt the 
nails pierce his hands and feet. He saw his mother 
weeping at the foot of the cross. But his spirit no 
longer shrank from the ordeal, for he had fought and 
won the battle in Gethsemane. 

The third prayer in the garden is but a repetition of 
the second, uttered rather as a thanksgiving than a peti- 
tion. He comes back to the sleeping disciples and tells 

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PASSION WEEK STUDIES 

them to sleep on for the hour when he needed their 
sympathy is over. Judas is already at hand and the 
Son of man is betrayed into hands of sinners, 

IV. The Practiced Message of Gethsemane. 

In our daily struggles upward, struggles which after 
all are insignificant when compared with those of our 
Master, how we shrink day after day from the un- 
pleasant duty which lies before us; how we hate to 
face it; how we use every means in our power to 
escape from it ; how the spirit struggles with the flesh ! 
And alas, too, how often with us the flesh gains the 
victory! This is the final lesson which I wish to 
draw from Gethsemane. Not all of us pass through 
it like the Christ. When we look ahead and see the 
bitter mockings of human tongues, and human criti- 
cisms, which await our action on the morrow; when 
we see the crown of thorns before us instead of the 
crown of laurel which our hearts had desired; when 
we feel the nails piercing through our hands and feet, 
as we are raised aloft on the cross of pain, our humili- 
ation, or sacrifice, we flee from the vision; we abjure 
our hopes of the future ; and our prayer is not "Lord, 
not as I will, but as thou wilt," but rather, "Lord, I 
will not have it so. I cannot bear it, there is no heaven 
for me!" And, if that be our prayer, there is no 
heaven for us. "To him that overcometh, to him will 
I give to drink of the fountain of life freely" — ^yes, 
always to him that overcometh. In that hour, human 
help will not avail, friends will have forsaken us, those 

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we have trusted will have proven broken reeds of com- 
fort; only the Christ who passed through the garden 
can bring us strength and victory. 

But in the hour of trial, let us not forget what 
victory means. Assuredly, it carries with it the new 
Eden, the Celestial Paradise, the Garden of God, the 
Tree of Life, the Throne of the Lamb, a residence 
forever in that place where there shall be no more pain, 
neither sorrow nor crying, and where God shall wipe 
away all tears from our eyes. It is the road to this 
land which lies through the garden of Gethsemane, and 
the only prayer that will enable us to pass through 
the garden is the supreme prayer of all the ages, 
"Father, not as I will, but as thou wilt." May that be 
the prayer of our hearts to-day, and always until the 
crown is won! 



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PASSION WEEK STUDIES 

2: Lessons from the Life of Judas 

TEXT: Matthew 10:4. "Judas Iscariot, who also betrayed 
him." 

HUMANITY is strange, varied, inexplicable ; both 
in its lights and in its shadows. Day is followed 
quickly by night: pleasure alternates with pain; sor- 
row is ever the companion of joy. There is a death's 
head at every feast, and if the bride wearing her 
orange blossoms were gifted with prophetic insight, she 
would see a grinning skeleton, peering with laughing 
mockery over her shoulder. Abel has Cain for a 
brother; Noah, Ham for a son; Christ, Judas for a 
disciple. 

I. Judas in Art. 

No character in the Bible save that of our Lord 
himself has provoked more serious discussion than 
Judas. He has found a place in art, in history and in 
literature; no less than in theology. One of the most 
striking characters in the realm of painting is that of 
Judas Iscariot. The earlier masters have all tried 
their hands on him. Giotto, the first of the great 

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painters of the Rennaissance makes him a hideous, 
thick lipped, closely cropped monster; hardly a man 
at all. When we look at this portraiture, we wonder 
how Christ could ever have chosen such a creature, in 
the first place, as one of the Twelve. 

In the city of Basle in Switzerland, there is a picture 
of the Last Supper, in which Judas is made so hideous 
that he becomes the central figure, obscuring in interest 
even the Christ. The painting is the work of Holbein, 
the great German artist. Judas Iscariot, it should be 
said, is never painted anywhere by himself. So intense 
was the hatred with which he was regarded during the 
Middle Ages that no picture with Judas alone in it 
would have survived the rage of the multitude over 
night. Hence we see him always with other figures; 
usually in the Last Supper, or in the betrayal. In the 
two most famous "Last Suppers" in the world, Leon- 
ardo da Vinci's in Milan, and Andrea del Sarto's in 
Florence, Judas is given a more noble appearance. 
Leonardo discloses him clutching the money bag 
tightly in his hand, and at the same time overturning 
the salt-cellar in his excitement, or fright. The stamp 
of villainy is upon his countenance, but the face is not 
hideous in itself ; in fact, it is rather handsome, so far 
as the individual features are concerned. Andrea has 
pictured the traitor as a miserable, weak, specimen 
of humanity exciting our pity, if anything, more than 
our disgust. 

A peculiar characteristic of all the paintings in 
which Judas appears is the color of the clothing which 
he wears. In every case, it is a dingy, dirty yellow. It 

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PASSION WEEK STUDIES 

is said to be on this account that yellow is so universally 
disliked in Spain and Italy. Malefactors sentenced to 
the scaffold or to the stake, galley slaves and the like, 
in these countries, were always clad in yellow. In 
Venice for a long time the Jews were obliged by law 
to wear yellow hats, and the feeling has come down 
in our own day in such slang phrases as "yellow 
journalism," or "playing yellow" in football, or other 
athletic sports. In some of the earlier pictures, the 
entrance of Satan into Judas is pictured by a little black 
demon, which is seen seated on his shoulder, whisper- 
ing to him, or even entering his mouth. 

II. Judas in Legend. 

But not only in the realm of art has imagination 
been busy with the character of the arch-traitor of the 
universe. Legends concerning his history were numer- 
ous in the Middle Ages filling in all the details which 
the gospel narratives omitted. It was said that even 
before his birth it had been prophesied that he should 
kill his own parents and betray his God. Terrified 
by the vision, his father had him enclosed in a chest 
and cast into the sea. The waters bore him to a strange 
country, where he was picked up by the king and queen 
and adopted as their son. When he grew up, his 
malignant nature soon made itself manifest. He op- 
pressed and finally killed his brother, the real son of 
the king, and then fled to Judea and entered the ser- 
vice of Pontius Pilate as a page. Afterwards, in ac- 
cordance with the prediction, he killed his parents, and 

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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

then overcome by a momentary remorse, he entered the 
service of Jesus of Nazareth. Avarice, the one sin 
of which he had not previously been guilty, now took 
possession of him, and under its spell he betrayed his 
master. 

It is needless to say that this old tradition, which 
was pretty universally believed during the Middle Ages, 
has no foundation in fact. The early church historians, 
on the contrary, attribute no inherent malignancy to 
Judas. Eusebius, one of the greatest of them all, 
says "Christ gave like gifts to Judas with the other 
apostles, and once our Saviour had good hopes of him, 
on account of the power of the free will, for Judas 
was not of such nature as rendered his salvation impos- 
sible; like the other apostles he might have been in- 
structed by the Son of God, and might have been a 
sincere and good disciple." 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the great English poet 
and essayist, took exactly the opposite view to the 
one expressed by Eusebius, but used it as the basis 
of an elaborate apology for the traitor. According to 
Coleridge, Christ must have been betrayed, and Judas 
was the one who was destined to betray him, hence no 
fault in the man himself attached to his action. Modern 
writers, like Paul Heyse, in Germany, in his famous 
production, "Mary of Magdala," have sometimes en- 
nobled Judas. Heyse, makes him one of the central 
figures of the drama, and motives his actions by con- 
siderations of disappointed ambition and love. Judas 
had lost faith in Christ because of the failure of the 
latter to establish a great earthly kingdom and to drive 

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PASSION WEEK STUDIES 

the hated Romans out of Palestine. A mistaken pa- 
triotism thus helped to explain the enormity of his 
crime. It may be worth while to add to the other 
opinions the universal belief of the followers of Mo- 
hammed, who have a strange superstition that Christ 
was caught up to heaven, and Judas, in his likeness, 
was crucified in his place. 

III. Judas in the Gospel Narrative. 

Out of this jumble of legendary material and fan- 
tastic speculation it is an infinite relief to turn to the 
pages of the Gospels and to read the simple story of the 
life of Judas just as they have given it. No more facts 
than they contain are needed in order to understand 
his character. A few strokes of the pencil give us, 
as if by magic, a complete outline of his history. 

Something, at least, hints at the predominating char- 
acteristic of his life in the lurid sketch of avarice re- 
vealed by his comment upon the anointing of Christ in 
the house of Mary and Martha. John, who was one of 
the Twelve, and knew the character of Judas well, 
says of him in plain words that he was a thief and a 
hypocrite into the bargain. 

Our interest in Judas in this study, however, deals 
primarily with the last day of his life. When we think 
of what that last day stands for, we usually waste little 
time on Judas. Our interest in him begins and ends 
in the betrayal scene; after that he fades from our 
view. And yet that last day was as much a tragedy 
for Judas as it was for the Master he betrayed. Let 
us sketch briefly the outlines of the tragedy. 

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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

IV. The Tragedy of Judas. 

There are four scenes following each other in rapid 
succession which tell the story of the tragedy of Judas. 
In the first scene, he is seated around the table with the 
other disciples partaking of the Last Supper. Strange 
black thoughts fill his heart. He has not been honest 
in his dealings, and he knows the one whom he serves 
well enough to know that this fact is not hidden from 
him. He feels condemned in the presence of his 
Master's purity. Moreover, may he not be called to 
a reckoning, and then what will happen? A disgrace- 
ful discharge from the band with the brand of "thief" 
written across his brow. In this frame of mind, he is 
quite ready to bring excuses to his conscience for the 
villainy he meditates. We can imagine his soliloquy as 
he thinks over the situation : 

He begins by casting doubts upon the Messiahship 
of his Master. "Had he been the Christ," he says to 
himself, "he would have restored, long ere this, the 
power and the glory of the temple of Jehovah to Jeru- 
salem. When the people wanted to make him a king, 
he timidly refused to accept their leadership. He 
played the coward when he ought to have played the 
hero. He, the Messiah, here in this little room, hiding 
in obscurity from the High Priest and the elders of his 
people ! Not such was the Messiah of Israel promised 
to be. Moreover, he is sure, sooner or later, to be 
taken ; whether I betray him or not. The High Priest 
and the authorities have soldiers and spies everywhere ; 
it is only a question of a day sooner or a day later, 

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PASSION WEEK STUDIES 

and I had as well have the money as any one else. Then 
after they have arrested him, what will they do with 
him? Probably beat him, and discipline him and let 
him go. They cannot put him to death, for it is 
against the law so to do.'* 

I do not think that Judas ever for a moment faced 
the thought of the crucifixion of Christ before he 
betrayed him. His after-remorse furnishes strong 
ground for this opinion. Moreover, I do not think 
that any human being, if he could have foreseen all 
that took place afterward could have deliberately be- 
trayed him. Judas was deceived, like most other 
criminals. He bargained for more than he intended. 

While these things are passing through the mind of 
Judas, the calm eyes of the Master gifted with more 
than mortal insight are reading, as in a book, every 
fleeting thought of his soul. Suddenly, he glances up 
with fixed determination written in his face; the final 
motive has appeared which will determine his will. 
What is it? It is the final motive always in the life 
of the thief. Gold ! "I shall have gold !" A paltry 
sum, the bribe appears in our eyes, but to the avari- 
cious, whether the amount be small or large, money al- 
ways brings temptation. , . . The decision is made, 
with all its momentous consequences for the future. 
Judas looks up and his gaze meets the sad face of the 
Christ. The latter knows, too, what the decision is. 
,With him there is a natural desire to be alone with 
those who have remained faithful; a desire likewise 
that the dreadful events which are to follow shall take 
place as soon as possible. "That thou doest, do 

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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

quickly/' he says, in strange warning notes to the 
traitor. Judas, his purposes kindled to a brighter 
blaze by the realisation that they are known, goes out, 
and the evangelist adds, with a wonderfully lurid touch, 
"when he went out it was night." Yes, night for Judas 
for evermore. Night with its black wings of despair 
hovering over his soul, black, hideous, unending night! 
Young man on the downward pathway ; sometime you 
will leave the lights of the upper chambers of the Good, 
and as you slam the doors of Innocence and Purity 
upon your soul, you will plunge out into the night 
alone. Beware, lest on your pathway, phantoms like 
those which pursued the Iscariot dog your heels ! Ter- 
rible words are those : "he went out and it was night." 

V. The Second Scene in the Tragedy. 

The second scene occurs in a lonely garden without 
the walls of the city. Judas has bargained with High 
Priest. The money has been paid him. It jingles in the 
pocket of his girdle. There are strange misgivings in 
his soul, but the music of the coin in his purse drowns 
them all. 

The crafty Caiaphas will have his victim before the 
traitor repents of his choice. A guard is ready im- 
mediately, Judas knows where to take them. Silently, 
hurriedly, they thread their way through the crowded 
streets of the capital. Then they come to the brook 
Cedron; stream immortal in the history of the world. 
As they pass over and enter the garden, suddenly, out 
of the shades, a figure presents himself saying, "Whom 

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PASSION WEEK STUDIES 

seek you?*' The guards fall back in astonishment, 
but Judas, eager to earn his money, steps forward 
and says in hollow tones, "Hail, Master!'* and kisses 
him. Then the Master looks at him with that gaze 
which never left the eyes of Judas until they were 
closed in the quietude of death. "Judas," he says, 
"betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?" "Will 
you," in other words, "make the symbol of your pre- 
vious devotion the means of betraying the best friend 
you have?" 

There was no time for Judas to reply, if he could 
have replied. Simon Peter has attacked the servant of 
the High Priest and wounded him. In the confusion, 
the disciples have fled, one and all; Jesus having for- 
bidden them to use any means of defence. Judas slinks 
away from the band as they bear their prisoner off to 
the temple court for his first trial before Annas. Some- 
how, the jingle of the money in his pocket is not as 
attractive as it had been. Those words "Betrayest thou 
the Son of man with a kiss?" keep ringing in his ears. 
He cannot get away from them. Like a murderer, who, 
after his crime has been committed, hopes against hope 
that his victim will come back to life, Judas hopes that 
his Master may soon be released. Nevertheless a 
dreadful foreboding is in his heart. He roams over 
the city seeking rest and finding none. The jingle of 
the money has become almost hateful; it has lost all of 
its attraction. Daylight dawns and suddenly he finds 
himself before the hall of the Roman governor. There 
is a great tumult; an immense crowd of people are 
crying out, "Crucify him. Crucify him !" Judas pushes 

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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

closer through the crowd. He climbs up where he can 
look over the shoulders of those in front of him, and 
then he sees his Master crowned with thorns, the 
blood streaming down his face, and ready to be led 
away to the cross! 

VI. The Third Scene in the Tragedy. 

Judas slips back into the crowd, and as he does so, 
the money jingles again in his girdle. He hears again 
the words "betrayest thou the Son of man with a 
kiss ?" His mind is a chaos of wild, indistinct thoughts. 
Only one thing seems clear to him — he must get rid of 
that money. He hastens through the struggling mass 
of humanity about him. He seeks everywhere for the 
High Priest. At last he finds him. He appeals to the 
crafty Sadducee, who only laughs at him now that he 
has served his term. "I have sinned in that I have 
betrayed the innocent blood," he says in harsh tones of 
despair. Again the Sadducee laughs : ''What is that to 
us?'* he says, "see thou to that." 

Modern prodigal, in the courts of sin; allured by 
specious promises of those who would have you for- 
sake the path of goodness; ruined, betrayed, undone 
at last, what have those for whom you have sacrificed 
body and soul to tell you as your final reward? Al- 
ways the same mocking words, "What is that to us? 
see thou to that!" In all the awful vocabulary of 
perdition, there is no language so terribly bitter, so 
poignant, so infused with the very incarnation of 
wretchedness and despair as those words of the High 

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Priest to Judas. And now what shall Judas do, when 
he realizes their meaning? Alas for the miserable vic- 
tim of sin. He has cast off by his own action the 
friendship of the Good, and now the friends he has 
bought at the cost of his own soul, forsake him and 
mock him. No one in all the wide world is so utterly 
alone. It is perhaps the final curse of perdition that 
it destroys all fellowship and condemns its votaries to 
the terrible solitude of their own guilty souls. 

VII. The Last Scene. 

For Judas there can be but one end. Had the Gospel 
narrative said nothing about it, we could have easily 
surmised the truth. Only one road is left open to him. 
The cold, desolate road of the suicide. Wildly, madly, 
he throws down the money which had lured him to his 
doom, in front of the High Priest. Hardly knowing 
where he is going, he rushes blindly through the 
streets ; — anywhere, just so he can get away from that 
last scene in the Garden. He passes by deserted houses ; 
the inhabitants are out to witness some spectacle, his 
mind surmises what it is — he has seen people crucified 
before. He hurries on until he gets beyond the walls. 
Then as he turns to the deserted edge of Hinnom, 
over whose precipitous rocky walls the brain becomes 
dizzy as one looks down, for a moment he seems at 
rest. There is no soul near, only the clear Judean sky 
above, only the warm, clear sunlight bathing his feet. 

He has almost forgotten that he is Judas, when 
suddenly he hears strange sounds from another section 

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of the walls. He stops and listens. Again and again 
the tumultuous cry goes up. He knows what it is. It 
is the procession beginning its march to Golgotha. . . . 
Over the grave of Judas in the potter's field, the 
Angel of Eternity has inscribed this epitaph: "The 
;wages of sin is death,'* 



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PASSION WEEK STUDIES 

3 : The Greater Sin 

TEXT: John 19:11. "Therefore he that delivered me 
unto thee hath the greater sin." 

THE text fixes special responsibility upon a par- 
ticular individual. It asserts that one above 
others is chargeable with peculiar guilt in the cruci- 
fixion of Jesus of Nazareth. Perhaps to most people 
the name of the individual specified comes as a surprise. 
If the suffrage of the world and particularly of the 
past ages were taken I suppose that the Iscariot would 
easily lead in the infamous competition. For ages, 
Judas has been regarded as the worst man that ever 
lived. When Dante wrote his Inferno, he put Judas 
down at the very bottom of perdition. When Robert 
Browning wanted somebody to associate on terms of 
equality with the worst character he could imagine, he 
picked Judas Iscariot. The Devil himself was not more 
cordially detested during the Middle Ages than was the 
traitor of the Twelve. The Devil with his horns and 
hoofs was expected to be bad — it was his nature — 
but Judas had no such excuse. 

Ranking next to Judas in the competition, according 
to popular estimation, came the man who sentenced 

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Jesus to the cross — the Roman Governor Pilate. Peo- 
ple could not forget that but for Pilate's sentence Jesus 
would have escaped the awful death before him. Pilate 
had it in his power to save or to condemn, and he con- 
demned; against his own will, perhaps, but the sen- 
tence none the less deadly on that account. The Cru- 
saders before the walls of Jerusalem heaped their male- 
dictions upon the head of Pontius Pilate. His name, 
like that of Judas, is in bad odour even to-day and he 
has had few namesakes, to say the least in Christian 
lands. 

I. The Man Who Had the Greater Sin, 

And yet the New Testament narrative, if carefully 
studied, shows that there was at least one man who was 
more guilty than either Judas or Pilate. There was 
one who lured the wretched traitor to his doom; who 
offered the money and when the deal was closed, and 
Judas repented of his bargain, laughed with cold- 
blooded indifference in his face. There was one who 
persuaded and threatened the unwilling Roman Gov- 
ernor until he passed sentence upon the victim of Judas. 
There was one who in defiance of law wrung an unjust 
sentence from the Sanhedrin and whose sleepless en- 
mity fired the mob to cry out, "Away with him! 
Crucify him! Crucify him!" The words of Jesus 
himself, as recorded in the text, fix the deepest stigma of 
guilt upon this man's brow. When Pilate in a species 
of insolent bravado said to him, "Speakest thou not unto 
me? knowest thou not that I have power to crucify 

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PASSION WEEK STUDIES 

thee and power to release thee?" Jesus replied, with 
the calm dignity of the martyr, "Thou couldst have 
no power at all against me except it were given thee 
from above: therefore he that delivered me tmto thee 
hath the greater sin." 

The man to whom he referred was named Joseph 
Caiaphas, for eleven years High Priest of the Jewish 
people, and to whose charge more than to that of any 
other one man in the world must be laid the crime of 
Calvary. 

II. The Trials of Jesus, 

There are three stages in the story which begins at 
Gethsemane and which ends on Golgotha. Over the 
first, like some malignant comet, the star of Judas rules ; 
over the second, that of Caiaphas ; and over the third, 
that of Pilate. When Judas* trembling lips pronounced 
the words "Hail Master!" and kissed him, his part 
in his Master's tragedy was over. His work had been 
done. While the temple mob with their lanterns and 
swords and staves are hurrying Jesus off to the palace 
of Annas, the father-in-law of Caiaphas, Judas slips 
away. From about one o'clock in the morning until 
day-break Jesus is in the hands of Caiaphas ; after that 
he is in charge of Pilate. During these four or five 
hours he is tried three times. First by Annas, the 
former High Priest and predecessor of Caiaphas who 
is unable to extract anything of value from him. 
Annas, therefore, sends him bound to Caiaphas where 
he has his second trial before a picked group of hostile 

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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

members of the Sanhedrin, illegally assembled, by 
whom he is found guilty, with the most flagrant viola- 
tion of law, and sentenced to death. After daylight 
has dawned, in order to give a semblance of formality 
to the sentence, Caiaphas hastily assembles the full 
Sanhedrin and obtains its sanction for the sentence 
which the earlier group had pronounced. 

In all, Jesus appears to have had seven distinct 
trials : the first before Annas ; the second and third 
before Caiaphas; the fourth before Pilate; the fifth 
before Herod Antipas; and the sixth and seventh 
before Pilate. Never was there a man in this world, 
before or since, tried so often in so short a time, and 
yet, after all of his trials, condemned with so little 
pretence of justice. 

With the man who was the chief agent in the first 
three trials we have to do in the present study. If I 
were expressing my own opinion of the relative guilt 
of those who had a hand in the death of Jesus, I would 
put Caiaphas first, then Annas, then the Chief Priests 
who were his companions, then Herod Antipas, then 
Judas, and Pilate last. This arrangement has been 
suggested by some careful students of the history, 
and it would seem to approach very closely to the 
truth. 

III. The Trial before Annas. 

Annas, before whom Jesus was taken first, is a 
character often mentioned in the history of the times 
outside of the gospels. He had been High Priest him- 
self for five or six years and no less than five of his 

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PASSION WEEK STUDIES 

sons, a son-in-law and a grandson had filled or were to 
fill that position. Annas, according to history, was 
avaricious and fond of luxury and ease. He and his 
family enjoyed a monopoly on the illegal sale of arti- 
cles in the temple courts which had been so severely con- 
demned by Jesus when he drove the money changers 
out of the temple with whips of cord. Business reasons 
no less than other considerations had therefore whetted 
his hatred of the Galilean prophet. He differs, at least 
as we see him in the gospels from his son-in-law in the 
fact that he is more crafty and less openly severe and 
unjust in his proceedings. Christ was doubtless taken 
before him first in order that his skilful powers of 
cross-examination might secure some evidence to be 
used at the later trial. 

The account of the trial before Annas is given only 
in the Gospel of John. The priestly examiner asked 
questions which related to two specific objects : the 
nature of Christ's teaching, and the names of his 
followers. To both queries, he received answers en- 
tirely unsatisfactory, and he was obliged to send his 
prisoner to Caiaphas without having secured any evi- 
dence. The man who had outwitted the most skilful 
followers of Annas in the temple on the Tuesday be- 
fore, had no difficulty in foiling their master^ So 
ended the preliminary trial before Annas. 

IV. The Trials before Caiaphas, 

The first trial before Caiaphas gives us a full length 
portrait of the man. Only a few weeks before, just 

[71] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

after the raising of Lazarus, he had declared that 
Jesus must die for the good of the people, an uncon- 
scious prophecy to be fulfilled in quite the opposite 
sense to that in which he intended. He meant that if 
this man kept on teaching, the house of Caiaphas and 
the Jewish hierarchy were doomed; it was therefore 
expedient that the man should be gotten out of the road. 
Caiaphas had been back of the bitter hatred of the 
Jerusalem Jews toward Jesus throughout the preced- 
ing year, he had used every means to apprehend the 
Nazarene but did not dare attempt it openly for fear of 
the people. Now, unexpectedly, the treason of Judas 
plays into his hands. Hastily gathering together some 
of his associates upon whom he can rely most assuredly, 
he summons them to his palace. It is probably between 
one and two in the morning, an illegal hour for the 
Sanhedrin to meet. Jesus is brought before them from 
the examination before Annas just on the other side 
of the temple square. There is no legal evidence 
against the prisoner, but this fact does not disturb 
Caiaphas. He has two witnesses hastily summoned, 
but in his hurry they have been badly coached and at 
once contradict each other. Then he resorts to the ex- 
pedient of extorting from the prisoner himself the 
confession which will seal his doom. With spectacular 
pretence he steps down from his seat as judge, and 
taking the place as prosecutor demands of Jesus 
whether he is or is not the Christ, ''the Son of the 
Blessed." As soon as the Nazarene has answered in 
the affirmative, he has him declared guilty and adjourns 
the meeting. Then when the sun has dawned, he calls 

[72] 



PASSION WEEK STUDIES 

a formal assembly of the Sanhedrin and secures a tech- 
nical endorsement of the earlier meeting. 

After this third formal trial, he sends his prisoner 
on to Pilate, the Roman Governor, with a request that 
he be put to death, and the burden of responsibility is 
shifted, in part at least, to the shoulders of the Roman. 

V. The Character of Caiaphas. 

When we come to a careful study of Caiaphas him- 
self, we find the whole story revealed by his actions 
in three momentous crises of his history. The first 
occurs when, after his question to Jesus, he steps back 
and with dramatic emphasis tears his robe from one 
end to the other, as though the answer of the Galilean 
was too horrible to be believed. Here the arrant hypo- 
crisy of the man comes into play. The second incident 
takes place before the judgment hall of Pilate early on 
the morning of Friday, the day of the crucifixion. The 
Sanhedrin officials have brought Jesus, with the sen- 
tence of death, to Pilate in order that he may be ex- 
ecuted. With murder in their hearts and the stain 
of innocent blood on their hands, they nevertheless re- 
fuse to enter the Governor's hall for fear of being 
ceremonially defiled. John tells the story: "And it 
was early, and they themselves went not into the judg- 
ment hall lest they should be defiled; but that they 
might eat the passover." Here we have a splendid ex- 
ample of that terrible formalism which Jesus had con- 
demned so often before. It was to this sort of thing 
that he referred when he said : "Ye blind guides, which 

[73] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel." The third inci- 
dent occurred at the crucial moment when Pilate brings 
Jesus for the last time before the multitude and says : 
"Behold your King." With the blood-stained brow 
of the innocent man, weak and faint as he was from 
scourging, before them Pilate rightly counted on a 
revulsion of feeling on the part of the people. But 
Caiaphas is equal to the emergency : He has the word 
passed around to all of his followers to set up a great 
cry — "We have no king but Caesar." . . . 

How sardonically Pilate must have smiled when he 
heard such a slogan from the lips of people who hated 
Caesar and the Roman rule worse than they hated 
Apollyon himself. Caiaphas and the Jews, Caesar's 
friends ! Very proud Caesar would be of their friend- 
ship too, if he knew it! But the trick works; Pilate 
dared not resist such an appeal, and Caiaphas, by an 
infamous deception, succeeds at last in condemning an 
innocent man to the cross. 

VI. Caiaphas as a Jew. 

In the character of Caiaphas we see as in a mirror 
the worst traits of his people focussed together and 
personified. The Jews have been, and are to-day, a 
peculiar people. The have furnished some of the best 
material that history knows, and they have likewise 
furnished some of the worst. They produced in olden 
times, Ahab and Abraham, Judas and Joshua, Caiaphas 
and Christ. Read the literature of the world and you 
find the same contrast. Scott's greatest heroine is a 

[T4] 



PASSION WEEK STUDIES 

Jewess; Dickens' worst character is a Jew. Shakes- 
peare's Shylock is so difficult to interpret that we hardly 
know where to class him, while Marlowe's Barabas is 
the most thoroughly bloodthirsty villain that humanity 
has ever imagined. 

It is a strange fact that the most striking character- 
istics of a people or of an age are often exhibited in 
some one individual. In this way, one man may stand 
for a whole generation, or a whole epoch. Shakespeare 
sums up in himself a century of literary history — ^nay, 
more, he is probably the typical Anglo-Saxon of all 
time. Goethe, with his profundity of thought, his 
many-sidedness, his insatiable curiosity, is the typical 
German, and will doubtless always remain so. Dante 
stands for Italy and the Middle Ages; Lincoln repre- 
sents America, and Napoleon, France. In these people, 
the genius of the age somehow became incarnate, and 
hence to know them means to know in large measure 
those for whom they stand. 

On his wonderful criticism of that most celebrated 
of all portraits, the Mona Lisa in Paris, Mr. Walter 
Pater argues that in this one woman the artist has em- 
bodied the history of her sex from the days of Eve 
down to the present age. He sees in her reflections of 
the coquetry of Helen of Troy, of the wiles of Cleo- 
patra of the Nile, of the beautiful devotion of Saint 
Anne — in short, she is the embodiment of the entire 
history of womanhood. It is an idea akin to this which 
I find necessary in the solution of the character of 
Caiaphas. The man himself is only the final and com- 
plete incarnation of the worst traits of that nation 

[75] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

whose wilfulness had so often led it to destruction, and 
whose rebellious disposition was doomed to bring down 
a still more awful vengeance upon its head. The blood- 
thirsty Ahab, the cruel and idolatrous Manasseh, the 
mad freaks of Saul, the tyranny of Rehoboam all ran 
in the blood and coursed through the veins of Caiaphas. 
Not even the Son of God himself could save such a 
man from destruction. 

In the parable of the Wicked Husbandmen, Jesus 
had illustrated the impossibility of averting destruc- 
tion from his people. The Master of the Vineyard 
had sent his messengers time and again to the husband- 
men, but they had beaten them and sent them away 
empty. Last of all, he sent his beloved Son, saying, 
''Surely they will respect him." But the husbandmen 
killed him, and cast him out of the vineyard with 
the callous comment: "He is the heir and the inheri- 
tance shall be ours." So thought Caiaphas and his 
followers when they counselled that one man should 
die for the people. In the end, however, the Master 
destroys the wicked husbandmen and lets the vineyard 
out to others. In like manner, forty years after the 
crucifixion of Jesus, Jerusalem is besieged and de- 
stroyed by Titus; the Jewish nation is dispersed; the 
temple is burned, never to be rebuilt, and the family 
of Caiaphas disappears from the face of the earth. 

VII. Final Lessons. 

The life of Caiaphas is strangely different from the 
life of Judas, or the life of Pilate. No repentance, or 

[76] 



PASSION WEEK STUDIES 

regret tinges the story of his career. In his descent 
into the final and bottomless pit of infamy he has no 
place left for conscience or remorse. A cold, callous, 
calculative hatred is his natural atmosphere, and for 
him there is no hope of repentance, since his own nature 
cannot understand the term. As we study his life, the 
fiery denunciations of the twenty-third chapter of 
Matthew become clear and luminous. Blood-thirsty, 
hypocritical to the core, externally religious, avaricious, 
and blinded by the lust for power and gold, he stands 
before the world as a type of the level to which hu- 
manity is capable of sinking, and a living proof of the 
hideous implications of the problem of evil. Why 
the world should want to create an artificial Devil when 
it has produced such characters as Caiaphas, and a few 
others of the same class, is beyond calculation. He 
appears to come nearest of all historic figures to that 
incarnation of evil which Shakespeare drew so perfectly 
in lago. But Caiaphas is compacted of flesh and 
blood, while lago is not. He has his lesson, too, for 
us. In the rogues' galleries of the world are many 
faces which were once the opposite of what they ap- 
pear in the gallery. There is the possibility of Caiaphas 
in all of us. We can sin against the Spirit of Light 
until our hearts become so hardened that even con- 
science dies and with it all hope of pardon. 

There are characters like Coleridge's "Life in Death" 
which wear the mask of humanity, but which ''thick 
man's blood with cold," for they are dead to all chance 
of moral resurrection. To such a class we must as- 
sign the man who plotted and brought about the cruci- 

[77] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

fixion of Jesus. We dare not use harsh terms when 
we speak of him, for his nature freezes us into silence. 
We dare not pity, attack, or condemn. We can only 
look into his face as we look into the black waters of 
some treacherous subterranean abyss whose unknown 
depths stir us with horror and aversion. And the most 
terrible comment we can make is to say, as we pass 
on with a shudder, "This being was once too, a man !" 



[78] 



VII 

THE ETERNAL QUESTION 

(An Easter Sermon) 

TEXT: Job 14:14. "If a man die, shall he live again?" 

SOME one has said that the great problems of the 
universe are all embodied in three simple ques- 
tions : "Whence came I ? What am I ? and whither am 
I going?" These questions are all, more or less inter- 
woven, and the answer to one is necessarily the key- 
to the answer to the others. No man has stood by the 
bedside of a friend and watched the life slowly ebb 
away until at last the form which was once bubbling 
over with animation and gaiety has become a clod more 
repulsive even than its companion clods of earth, with- 
out asking the question of Job, "If a man die, shall he 
live again ?" 

No man, too, has seen the casket lowered into the 
ground and pronounced, or heard pronounced, the 
solemn words; "Earth to earth; dust to dust; ashes to 
ashes," without asking himself how far those words are 
true, and what is the exact significance they ought to 
convey. Aside from any question of religious belief, 
these questions force themselves upon us, and he would 
be callous to an unmeasured degree who did not give 
them some consideration. Doubtless, with most of us, 

[79] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

there is always a tendency, even in spite of ourselves, 
to take what we are sure of and let the rest alone. This 
tendency is embodied in the old proverb to the effect 
that a bird "in the hand is worth two in the bush," or 
as Robert Her rick puts it : 

"Gather ye rosebuds while ye may 
Old Time is still a flying." 

or, in the quatrains of an Omar : 

"Some for the Glories of this world, and some 
Sigh for the Prophet's Paradise to come. 
Ah, take the Cash and let the Credit go 
Nor heed the rumble of a distant drum; 

Oh, threats of Hell and hopes of Paradise ! 
One thing at least is certain: this Hfe flies. 
One thing is certain and the rest is lies. 
The Flower that once has blown forever dies." 



I. The Philosophy of Materialism. 

On one of the oldest mausoleums discovered in the 
East is the inscription, comprising the epitaph of 
one of the greatest monarchs of the ancient time, "Let 
us eat, drink, and be merry, for the rest is nothing." 
And so materialism, or the belief that the body, or 
matter, is the only reality is very old and has always 
had numerous advocates. Some of the Old Testament 
writers, like the author of Ecclesiastes and even the 
authors of certain of the psalms, seem to look upon the 
body as an essential condition of existence. The an- 
cient Egyptians embalmed their dead because they 
believed they would need their bodies when they were 
raised for judgment. Even the early Christians were, 

[80] 



THE ETERNAL QUESTION 

for the most part, materialists, as the clause in the 
Apostle's Creed relating to the resurrection of the 
flesh indicates, and while they universally held to the 
miracle of the ultimate resurrection of the body, they 
nevertheless believed that there could be no life without 
it. Saint Paul combated this theory in the fifteenth 
chapter of First Corinthians. 

Coming on down the ages to the present era, ma- 
terialism has held its own, and during the last century 
it gained tremendous influence through the advances 
of modem science. Researches in biology, and the 
closer study of other departments of life have shown 
the intimate connection between the body and the soul, 
and have led many people to believe that the less 
obvious one is only the product of the other. 

11. The Arguments for Materialism. 

Various arguments have been advanced to prove this 
position. It has been shown by experiment that mental 
diseases are always accompanied by disorder of brain 
tissue; that the pressure of a slight piece of the skull 
upon the brain will cause insanity, and that the insanity 
will disappear when the operation known as trepan- 
ning, is performed. There are hospital cases on record 
where operations affected even the moral nature of the 
patient and transformed an incorrigible, vicious child 
into a docile and obedient boy. It has been shown that 
certain sections of the brain govern certain fields of 
thinking and action, and that the two things, if not 
causally related, at least run side by side. The ma- 

[81] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

terialist points proudly to the fact that no mind or 
soul has ever been known without a brain, and that 
size and fineness of brain structure have always gone 
hand in hand with genius and intellectual development. 
There is a certain limit of brain size below which the 
person possessing it is sure to be an idiot. Most great 
men have had large brains, though it is acknowledged 
that there have been exceptions to the rule. 

Moreover, the general dependence of the mind upon 
the body is elaborated at length. A person cannot do 
prolonged mental labour without physical nourishment. 
When the body is fatigued the mind is not at its best ; 
when the stomach is out of order, the person has the 
blues; when the nerves are diseased, he is fussy and 
irritable and takes an erratic view of life. If Thomas 
Carlyle had not been a confirmed dyspeptic, who knows 
whether he would have been so melancholy in tempera- 
ment? Who shall say that Browning's optimism was 
not in part due to a healthy liver and to an unrivaled 
digestive system? If Schopenhauer had not been dis- 
eased in body and brain he might never have been a 
pessimist ; and the crazy philosophy of Nietzsche, which 
has wrought so much harm in the world may be best 
accounted for by serious lesions of the brain, I am 
inclined to think not only on the part of the philosopher 
but also of his adherents. "Let a man work hard," 
says the materialist, "and get but little to eat and he 
soon becomes a full-fledged pessimist, while if you 
give him capon and terrapin and a good digestive sys- 
tem he is apt to take a tolerant if not indeed a roseate 
yiew of his surroundings. 

[82] 



THE ETERNAL QUESTION 

There is a further argument drawn from the effect 
of age and disease upon the brain and its correspond- 
ing influence upon the mind. As a man grows older 
and weaker in body, his mind becomes less vigorous; 
the memory fails along with the nerves, and the power 
of quick and ready thought is not as acute as it was in 
the earlier years of his life. 

It would not seem to be necessary, however, to state 
at further length the position of those who hold that 
the body, or the material existence, is the real man or 
the real woman. Let it suffice to say that if the in- 
fluence of the mind upon the body be of great impor- 
tance, as is frequently asserted, no less strong and 
cogent arguments can be brought to prove a like in- 
fluence of the body upon the mind. Human life, on 
the surface at least, is a dualism and it depends largely 
upon the point of view we choose as to which side 
we shall see. Materialism, it is unnecessary to say, is 
the easy and obvious solution of the world. If we 
can imagine a cow or a horse thinking over the ques- 
tion at all, it is the philosophy which either or both 
of them would choose. It is the philosophy of the 
present moment and its teachings are easy to hold and 
to understand. There has always been a great deal of 
it in the world, and while men remain partly animal in 
their structure, as they are, it is only reasonable to 
suppose that there will be some who will elect to believe 
that they are wholly animal. There are poets of ma- 
terialism like Whitman (though Whitman was not al- 
together a materialist), and prophets of materialism 
like Elbert Hubbard (though Hubbard was not alto- 

[83] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

gether a prophet), and believers in materialism who 
defy the laws of society in so far as they place any 
restrictions upon the earthly side of their natures ; and 
yet it is no less true that the moulders of the world's 
thought and the builders of the world's ideals never 
have been and never will be, materialists. 

III. The Case against Materialism. 

There was never a supremely great philosopher, 
poet or constructive genius of any kind who thought 
that the body was the all and all of life. Plato, Soc- 
rates, Kant, Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Vir- 
gil, Goethe, Michael Angelo were all of them, idealists 
of an advanced type. "We feel that we are greater 
than we know," and though life begins in the dust we 
have a heritage which reaches to the stars. It is the 
unique privilege of man that he has thoughts "beyond 
the reaches of his soul," thoughts which "wander 
through eternity." Materialism not only cuts us off 
from these but it curtails the proper enjoyment of its 
own legitimate pleasures. As the body reacts on the 
soul, so the soul reacts on the body, and the man or the 
woman who gives the soul its proper place in his or 
her life is apt to have the most harmonious and desir- 
able bodily existence. 

I knew a man, a bank president in my home town, 
who was a disbeliever in the immortality of the soul, 
and yet all of his life he was in mortal terror of dying 
and nearly drove himself frantic avoiding, or trying 
to avoid, disease, and dieting himself to prolong his 

[81] 



THE ETERNAL QUESTION 

existence to the last possible minute. On the whole, 
I think he led the most miserable life of which I have 
had any knowledge. There are few even of the most 
confirmed materialists who are always quite sure of 
their position. They may confidently assert that death 
ends all, but how do they know ? It is useless to chaff 
the man who believes in a future life by saying that 
when a man dies we know nothing more of the soul. 
Of course not, but by the same token we know nothing 
of its annihilation. The man talked to us an hour ago ; 
he talks no more, but does that prove that he has 
vanished into nothingness? When he talked we did 
not see him, we saw his lips move but the lips were not 
the man and the question is where has the man gone? 
Materialism, by its own discoveries, has in fact 
practically committed suicide. The discovery of the 
law of the Conservation of Energy, which Professor 
Huxley styled the greatest achievement of the nine- 
teenth century, proves that although energy constantly 
changes form it is never destroyed. Heat goes into 
steam ; steam into electricity, and so on, but no energy 
is ever lost. Now the highest possible form of energy 
is the human personality. At death, there is a change, 
that is certain, but does the change mean the destruc- 
tion of personality? If it does, nature is here, at the 
most important position in her realm, contradicting 
herself and negating her own law. The human body is 
entirely renewed every seven years. Not a particle 
of fibre which was in my body seven years ago, in all 
probability, is in it to-day; and yet I was myself then 
and I am myself now. I have changed but I am still 

[85] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

the same man. And so, when the last great change 
comes, does it mean that that change is to be annihila- 
tion or extinction? The man who so asserts takes a 
tremendous responsibility upon himself. Callous, in- 
deed, must he be, if he does not inwardly repeat with 
Hamlet : 

"To die; — to sleep; — 
To sleep, perchance to dream; — ay, there's the rub; 
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, 
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil. 
Must give us pause." 

IV. The Christian Solution. 

It is just here where we pause, in our earthly reason- 
ing, that the divine answer comes. Of ourselves, we 
cannot solve the problem. There is nothing in nature 
which will absolutely demonstrate immortality, but 
there is just as certainly nothing which disproves it. 
Hence there arises both the necessity and the possibility 
of a revelation such as that which God has made 
through Jesus Christ: The necessity, because of our- 
selves we cannot solve the problem; the possibility, 
because there is nothing in nature to contradict the 
truthfulness of the solution. It is for this reason that 
the gospel of the resurrection has practically conquered 
the world. The Apostle Paul was right when he staked 
the whole case for the Christian religion upon the fact 
of the resurrection. If Christianity has made no con- 
tribution here, there is no chance that the religion of 
Christ will become the ultimate religion of humanity. 
It is the gospel of the Open Tomb which means most 

[86] 



THE ETERNAL QUESTION 

to the sorely tried and broken hearted of all the ages. 

In the face of the Christian solution of the eternal 
question, the man who does not accept that solution 
has the option of standing before the open grave and 
in answer to the question of the text: "if a man die, 
shall he live again?" of saying, "I affirm of my own 
will that he shall not live." Prove it, he cannot ; affirm 
it, he may. And what, pray, does he gain by the affirm- 
ation? The heritage of the beast of the field and the 
fowls of the air, instead of the heritage of the hero, the 
sage, or the martyr; the goal of the libertine, the 
drunkard, the man who has wasted and spoiled the 
goodly inheritance of eternity, and who would fain 
escape any reckoning by doing away at once with re- 
sponsibility and with life; the portion of the coward 
and the slothful, the coveted boon of the idler and the 
debauchee. 

Is it not an infinitely better choice to bravely affirm, 
in the light of revelation and with at least the full per- 
mission of reason : "I believe in a heritage beyond the 
stars; in a resurrection from the grave, and in an 
immortality of light; in a destiny worthy of him who 
was created in the image of God and who chooses 
never to renounce or to barter away his immortal 
birthright!" 



t87] 



VIII 

IDEAL WOMANHOOD 

(Mother's Day Sermon) 

TEXT : The Magnificat, Luke i '.46-5$. 

"And Mary said, My soul doth magnify the Lord, 
And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior. 
For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden : 
For, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call 

me blessed 
For he that is mighty hath done to me great things, 
And holy is his name. 
And his mercy is on them that fear him 
From generation to generation. 
He hath shewed strength with his arm ; 
He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their 

hearts. 
He hath put down the mighty from their seats, 
And exalted them of low degree. 
He hath filled the hungry with good things ; 
And the rich he hath sent empty away. 
He hath holpen his servant Israel, 
In remembrance of his mercy; 
As he spake to our fathers, 
To Abraham, and to his seed for ever. 

[88] 



IDEAL WOMANHOOD 

I. The Woman of Leonardo. 

In that magnificent collection of paintings and statu- 
ary in the Louvre, which is the pride of Paris and the 
people of France, there is the portrait of a woman 
now somewhat faded with age and withal so simple 
and unostentatious in appearance that the average 
tourist, if left to himself, would probably pass it by un- 
noticed. When he is told, however, by his guide or his 
guide book, as the case may be, that this faded por- 
trait is the greatest art treasure — unless the Venus de 
Milo be an exception — in the possession of the French 
people, he pauses to notice it more carefully. If he is 
a man of discernment, he will be conscious of a pecu- 
liar fascination gradually stealing over him as he gazes 
into the face of the woman who looks down from her 
canvas imprisonment of over four hundred years. 
The eyes seem to read the soul and to draw forth its 
secrets whether willingly released or not. There is 
the most bewitching of all smiles that have ever been 
imagined playing around the beautiful lips and mouth; 
the hair and the hands are perfect. Surely, we say, 
here was a woman bom to conwnand and to sway the 
hearts of men, and to lead them whithersoever she 
would. We go away from that room feeling impressed 
with the innate power which woman can wield as we 
have never felt it before.' And yet there is an uncanny 
sensation also present of which we are conscious and 
from which we cannot escape. I do not believe that 
any one has ever left that room in the Louvre and 
wished for just such a woman for either a wife, a 

[89] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

sister, a daughter or a mother. Nevertheless, she em- 
bodied the greatest conception in portraiture of the 
most daring genius in art — the world renowned Leon- 
ardo da Vinci. 

We have been gazing, as many of you have doubtless 
guessed, upon the Mona Lisa of Leonardo — the final 
achievement in portraiture of the artist who painted 
what is usually regarded as the greatest picture in the 
world, the Last Supper, at Milan, and the painter whose 
conception of the Christ face is the only one in the 
realm of art which is at all worthy of its subject. 

IL The Woman of Raphael. 

But perhaps we do not have a great deal of time to 
spend in Paris, and so the train is soon whirling us 
across what were once the magnificent wheat-land and 
the vine-clad orchards of Burgundy and the Rhine, 
where the fields used to be like great gardens and where 
the roads were solid and level as marble so that one 
horse could draw as much as three can in this country, 
but a land which is now little more than a collection of 
shell-dug craters of earth and rock, until, in perhaps a 
few weeks, we arrive in Dresden, the capital of Saxony, 
and the art centre of Germany as Paris is the art 
centre of France. As the Louvre is the pride of the 
French people, so the Dresden gallery is the pride of 
the Germans, and if France can boast that she possesses 
the greatest portrait painted by Leonardo, Saxony can 
retort that she possesses the greatest picture of Raph- 
ael, Leonardo's great successor and rival. Poor 

[90] 



IDEAL WOMANHOOD 

Italy which produced both of them, has neither — but 
then Italy has enough of others, and to spare. It is 
worth a trip to Europe, under normal travelling condi- 
tions, just to see the Sistine Madonna, the greatest 
representation of the highest type of mother-love that 
was ever put upon canvas or that ever shaped itself 
in the mind of an artist. Most of you have doubtless 
seen reproductions of the picture — the mother with 
her infant in her arms and the little winged cherubs at 
the bottom of the painting. The face does not fasci- 
nate one like the mysterious woman of Leonardo ; she 
seems absolutely incapable of attempting to fascinate 
or bewitch or in any way wield the terrible power that 
lies back of the calm brow and the magic smile of Mona 
Lisa. There is only one thing written in the picture, 
but that thing, St. Paul says is "the greatest thing in 
the world," for it is love, love for the bright-eyed child 
she presses to her bosom, love pure, unselfish, divine. 
If Mona Lisa speaks of power and conquest and the 
empire of the siren; Mary of Dresden speaks of love, 
and unselfish devotion, and the empire of the mother. 

III. The Two Types of Womanhood in Contrast. 

These two pictures compromise what may be styled a 
universal biography of womanhood. The two types 
of women which have striven for mastery since the 
foundation of the world are here embodied in the ulti- 
mate creations of two of the greatest of world artists. 
Every girl who is bom into this human life of ours 
sooner or later chooses between them, and forms as her 

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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

ideal a woman modelled after the one or the other. All 
the women whose names have come down to us in his- 
tory range themselves invisibly under one or the other 
of these two generic types. Under Mona Lisa we may 
group Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, the serpent of the 
Nile, Mary, Queen of Scots, Marguerite of Valois, 
and all of the coquettes and sirens whose eyes have 
lured men to destruction, who have shattered the peace 
of individuals and of nations and who have helped to 
make the world worse because they have lived in it. 
On the other sides are ranged, Florence Nightingale, 
the angel of mercy on fields of battle, our own Frances 
^illard, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Victoria, the 
peace-loving Queen of England, and all of the un- 
known mothers and sisters who have brought sunshine 
into countless homes and who have helped to make the 
world better because they have lived in it. To-day the 
contest is still going on — the unceasing battle between 
the requirements of "society" and the requirements of 
home, between the desire to wield the power of the co- 
quette and to become the humble centre of the hearth- 
stone — the never ending conflict between Mary of 
Scotland and Mary of Dresden. 

IV. The Mannish Woman. 

There is, it should be noted as a passing corollary, 
another type of woman of which we occasionally hear 
a good deal in the columns of the press and through 
the caricatures in the comic newspapers — the so-called 
* 'mannish" type, the woman who affects masculine at- 

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IDEAL WOMANHOOD 

tire, masculine language, and masculine tastes and who 
does her best, in every possible way, to repudiate her 
own sex. We have not included her, or him, in this 
catalogue because, by her own choice, she has placed 
herself outside the class which we have been consider- 
ing. The woman who is not satisfied with her birth- 
right as a woman — that is, as the latest, fairest, and 
most refined of all the creations of God, hardly de- 
serves any further consideration. The attempt to dis- 
card that birthright, to paraphrase a well known pass- 
age in Hamlet, simply discloses "a pitiful ambition in 
the poor fool that makes it." 

V. The Siren Type. 

But the first type of woman we have mentioned — the 
worshipper of Lady Lisa — demands more careful con- 
sideration. We find her in every rank and station of 
society, nay she exists in barbarous lands and in coun- 
tries where Leonardo's name was never heard and 
where Leonardo's art was never practised. She lives, 
it is true, in the royal palace, and her brow of alabaster 
is bound with glittering circlets of diamonds and pearls, 
but she lives likewise in the humble cottage and her 
brow is no less fair because it lacks the diamonds of her 
sister. There is one altar upon which she sacrifices 
ruthlessly everything else, and that is the altar of 
Power. Power to rule men by her smiles and her 
frowns; power to make women envy her because of her 
beauty and charm ; power to make those who rule the 
world bow before her, that she may rule them. To 

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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

such a woman, home has few attractions, and the home 
which she builds is, in fact, never home at all. Her 
children are strangers to her, and her husband an 
article of furniture, differing only from other articles 
in the fact that he, or it, is alive and has the faculty of 
voluntary motion. She must live in a style equal to or 
surpassing her neighbours and her husband must pay 
for it. If he has the money, it is all right; if he hasn't 
it, he must get it. Upon the altar which she has built 
she will sacrifice everything — home, comfort, friend- 
ship, religion, and her example penetrates downward 
through every station of society. The woman with an 
income of a million wants to live like the woman with 
a million and a half ; the woman with a thousand, like 
the woman with fifteen hundred, while in the ranks of 
those with other incomes there is the constant desire to 
outshine or equal those who have more. 

The consequences of this worship of the Lisa ideal 
are found in the disordered social conditions which 
America and other countries present to-day. Marriages 
are becoming less binding, divorces more numerous, 
while the homes, if the spirit of the real home will 
pardon my using the name, which this false ideal has 
rendered unhappy and miserable would be hard to 
number or estimate. One can understand the temptation 
which power has for men and women alike, but it is 
doubtful if any use or abuse of it has wrought the 
harm and the unhappiness that this worship has 
brought. And what is the reward ? Bitterness and hu- 
miliation and disappointment, in the end. The society 
queen does not rule for a lifetime; the coquette loses 

[94] 



IDEAL WOMANHOOD 

her empire as quickly as it is won, and in the bitterness 
of an old age of blasted hopes and painful recrimina- 
tions she closes her days. Cleopatra puts the asp to her 
bosom and dies a suicide; Mary, Queen of Scots, is 
beheaded in the castle of Fotheringay — the ideal of 
domination, the society ruler, the coquette, is a false 
ideal, and behind the smile of Mona Lisa are hidden 
fountains of tears. 

VL The Mother Type. 

When we turn to the other picture, the ideal of 
Mary, how different is the story. In the hurry and 
bustle of the twentieth century, men are as ready to pay 
the same homage to true womanhood that they have 
been ready to pay in the past. Let no one imagine that 
there is a section of society in existence to-day where 
the home type, the Mary type, is not longed-for and 
cherished. The words "For behold from henceforth 
all nations shall call me blessed'* have become a living 
truth, not only because of the Christ who was bom 
of her, but also because of the sublime type of woman- 
hood for which she stands — a type so sublime that she 
has become an object of worship for over a hundred 
milHons of people to-day. We need not worship the 
maiden of Nazareth in order to recognise in her the 
highest type of earthly womanhood. In her humble 
life as a village girl, she was taught to be true to the 
religion of her fathers, to be pure in heart and life, 
and to be right-minded and sincere in all she did or 
said At her quiet village home, the murder of the 

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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

great and beautiful queen Mariamne was talked about 
while she was a little girl, and Cleopatra, the mistress 
of the world, had died probably only a year or two be- 
fore she was born. How different was her life, the life 
of the peasant girl of Nazareth, to be from theirs! 
It is noticeable that there is not very much said about 
Mary in the gospels nor is there much recorded that 
she said. The sublime poem of the Magnificat, which 
formed the substance of our text, contains almost her 
whole history. And yet there is quite enough said to 
reveal the nature of the woman deemed worthy to be- 
come the mother of the Christ. Her whole life was 
wrapped up in the life of her child, just as many a 
mother's life has been since her day, his glory was hers 
and she needed no other glory of her own. Mariamne, 
in her proud beauty, might humble the awful Herod 
before her, and Cleopatra might shine as the ruler of 
the world and receive the flattery and the homage of 
princes and nobles, but her empire was of a higher 
order and her attendants of a nobler kind. Mary 
suffered much, as the Marys of this world often have 
to suffer, but she bore her lot with sublime patience 
and resignation and she has not lost her reward. At 
the foot of the cross her heart was broken but on the 
resurrection morn that wound was healed and once 
more her lips chanted the Magnificat of her girlhood 
days. 

When we are asked to name the dominant feature 
of her character, but one answer is possible — love. 
Lady Lisa and her attendants thirst for power and for 
the gratification of selfish ambition, but Mary is con- 

[96-i 



IDEAL WOMANHOOD 

tent to sink all thoughts of self in her child and to ask 
for no power save that wielded by the loving sceptre of 
a mother. And of all the unselfish agencies in the world 
is there any quite so unselfish as a true mother? Al- 
ways, the nearest approach to the divine love has been 
the love of a consecrated mother. 

Next to love, in the character of Mary, came devo- 
tion. "My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit 
hath rejoiced in God, my Saviour." She believed with 
all her heart in God. She never questioned his exis- 
tence, his goodness, or his power. He was very 
real to her. In the morning when she awoke, her 
prayers went up to him, and at night she fell asleep 
with his name upon her lips. Well might angels 
watch her slumber and fill her soul with dreams of 
Paradise. 

After love and devotion in her character, came 
humility. "He hath regarded the low estate of his 
handmaiden." How different is this spirit from the 
pride of Cleopatra which made all of her attendants fear 
even to tell her the truth, and which exacted homage 
from high and low alike. The great lessons of Christ's 
life — The Pharisee and the Publican — ^the washing the 
disciples feet and the like, were all lessons of humility 
but none of his disciples ever learned them like his 
mother. 

Love, devotion, humility — these three form the 
great trinity which produces the ideal type of woman- 
hood. These three, too, are those characteristics which 
link humanity closest to the divine. In the life of a 
true mother there is less of earth and more of heaven 

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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

than there is in any other life that has been or can be 
lived. When every other influence that makes for 
good has faded out of his life, the most depraved man 
cannot forget the mother who loved him in his boy- 
hood days. 

What a heritage is a birthright such as this, and 
what an infinite pity when this birthright is thrown 
away or sacrificed upon the gilded altars of Society or 
Fashion or any of the false gods of human invention ! 
When one thinks of these truly terrible sacrifices which 
are being made every day, he can appreciate something 
of the pathos wrapped up in those words of Othello 
which no human tongue has ever adequately uttered: 
"O, lago, the pity of it, the pity of it !" Yes, in the 
light of these supreme tragedies, we may well say — 
"the pity of it." For, alas, opportunities so tremen- 
dous as these: the opportunity of living closer to 
God, of hearing the motion of angels' wings in the 
prattle of little children, and of becoming the very in- 
carnation of heaven on earth in the sacred circle of the 
home, carry with them, likewise, tremendous responsi- 
bilities. If it be true that woman can rise higher than 
man, it is also true that she can sink lower, and the 
evil deeds of the daughters of earth have written sad 
pages in the history of the world and in the lives of 
men. I have often thought that the destinies of hu- 
manity are placed much more largely in the hands of 
women than in those of men. In a very true sense 
men are not what their fathers but what their mothers 
make them. There is a passage in one of Coventry 

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IDEAL WOMANHOOD 

Patmore*s poems which every woman would do well 
to ponder : 

"Ah, wasteful woman, she who may 
On her own self set her own price. 
Knowing he can not choose but pay — 
How has she cheapened Paradise! 
How given for naught her priceless gift, 
How spoiled the bread and spilled the wine. 
Which spent with due respective thrift, 
Had made brutes men, and men, divine." 



VII. Religion and Womanhood. 

I come back, in my final word, to the song of Mary 
— "My soul doth magnify the Lord." There is a Per- 
sian proverb which says that a woman without reli- 
gion is like a flower without perfume. It is supremely 
appropriate that "Mother's Day" should be celebrated 
in church. It is religion which sanctifies the home and 
which makes motherhood the sacred sacrament which 
it has become in all Christian lands. May our celebra- 
tion to-day be filled with that spirit of love, devotion 
and humility which was so supremely characteristic 
of the ideal mother of the Bible, as well as of her Son 
who has become our Saviour and the Saviour of the 
world ! 



[99] 



IX 

LIFE THROUGH DEATH 

(A Sermon for Decoration Day) 

TEXT: John 12:24. "Verily, verily, I say unto you. Ex- 
cept a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it 
abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much 
fruit." 

LIFE through death is God's law for the universe. 
The flowers which bloom in all their luxuriance 
upon the bosom of mother earth; the trees which lift 
their giant forms toward the heavens; the grass upon 
a thousand hills ; the lily, the violet and the rose : these 
all live because something has died. 

"Life evermore is fed by death, 
In earth, in sea and sky; 
And that a rose may breathe its breath. 
Something must die." 

I. Life through Death in the Material World. 

There is no birth without death. It may be that the 
death is only a partial one, but if not complete, it is at 
least the beginning of the end. That was not altogether 
a fable, which was embodied in the old story of the 
Phoenix, the miraculous bird of Arabia. We are told 
that this wonderful creature lived for five hundred 
years, and when the time came for the bird to die, it 

[100] 



LIFE THROUGH DEATH 

built itself a nest in the summit of some gigantic palmi 
tree. With all the strength at its command, it heaped 
together frankincense and myrrh and sweet scented 
gums of every kind, and then upon this funeral pyre 
of its own creation, it breathed its last. And now forth- 
with, from the dead body of the Phoenix, the infant 
bird is born and with its gorgeous plumage of gold and 
green it flies forth in the glory or the sunlight to begin 
its new career. 

The story, I say, is not all a fable. Every day it 
finds its counter-part in actual life. A mother dies 
that her babe may live. A father toils unweariedly 
day after day, night after night, giving a little portion 
of his life with every setting of the sun, that his child 
may possess fortune, or education, or success. Will 
you point to any of the great works of this world, 
which have not come into being at the cost of life? 
There is not a marble palace in the universe which is 
not likewise a tomb. Its massive walls are cemented 
with blood, and the hollow voices of the dying and the 
dead are heard above the gayest music of the dance 
and the carnival, within its halls. The pyramids of 
Egypt have survived the ravages of time for fifty 
centuries. For five thousand years the birth song of 
the springtide, and the hectic glow of autumn's with- 
ered leaves have faded beneath their feet. For five 
thousand years, the sons of men have struggled and 
bled and died in the sands by their side. For five thou- 
sand years, the wedding march and the funeral dirge 
have alike ascended to the heavens, and they have 
been silent witnesses. They have stood the test of the 
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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

Past, and the Future seems all their own. But beneath 
the sombre base of the pyramids lie the crushed and 
mangled bodies of a hundred thousand slaves, who 
died that they might be built. Beneath the cruel lash 
of the task-master, they sank down upon the burning 
sand and died. Tears and blood and agony and death, 
these things, have purchased earth's longest span of 
immortality for those massive heaps of stone we call 
the pyramids. 

What is true of past history, is just as true to-day. 
The New York subway is a sepulchre, no less than 
a means of transit, and blood has entered into the 
mortar which lines its walls. Our gigantic railroad 
systems, which have become the great arteries of com- 
merce and which bear to us the products of every dis- 
tant land ; which have placed New York within sixteen 
hours of Chicago, and which have enabled us to girdle 
the world in thirty days, have all been purchased, not 
so much with dollars, as with lives, and with the tears 
of the widows and orphans which they have made. 
In the shriek of every locomotive whistle, if you listen, 
you can hear the shriek of a dying man, and the fire- 
man who heaps the coal into the furnace of the engine 
may, by, a slight stretch of the imagination, be said to 
be building the funeral pyre for some unfortunate 
being, not unlikely himself. None of us has much faith 
in ghosts, but if there are ghosts anywhere in the 
world, they ought to be walking across the ties of a 
railroad. Our railroads are great and beneficent in- 
stitutions, but they have cost much in human life, and 
we are not yet through paying the debt. 

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LIFE THROUGH DEATH 

II. Life through Death in the Social World, 

Turning from the mere lifeless creations of brick 
and stone and iron, to the unseen fabric of national and 
social life, we find the same story. Our great na- 
tion of over a himdred millions of fil-eemen did not 
spring into existence to the tune of a wedding march, 
or to the swaying melody of the dance. Its music was 
of a more serious character. Our fathers died that we 
might live. Upon Bunker Hill and Long Island and 
at Saratoga, they poured out their blood like water that 
we might be free. The bitter privations of Valley 
Forge, the tracks of blood left in the snow as they 
marched bare- footed over many a frozen field, are well- 
nigh forgotten to-day, but it was these things which 
purchased our independence. Without the sacrifice 
of life, the generalship of Washington and the states- 
manship of Jefferson would have amounted to nothing. 
Freedom and life were hung in the balance before the 
eyes of our fathers, and they chose to sacrifice life that 
they might have freedom. 

When you look upon the flag of your country, do 
you know what it ought to stand for in your mind? I 
will tell you a little of what it ought to mean. The 
red stripes signify the blood of your forefathers shed 
upon the field of battle in crimson streams that you 
might be free ; the white bars stand for the pale cheeks 
of the widows and maidens, whose husbands and 
brothers died that you might be free; the blue field 
with its galaxy of stars, represents the pale blue vault 
of the heavens into which many a dying soldier looked 

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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

with feverish eyes as the shades of night hovered over 
the battle field. These all died that America might be 
free. Who will say that their death has not borne 
abundant fruit? 

"Except a com of wheat fall into the earth and die, 
it abideth by itself alone, but if it die, it bringeth forth 
much fruit." Upon this day, when we commemorate 
the sacrificial death of the brave men who gave their 
all for their country, let us think for a moment of the 
older heroes who died in order that the nation itself 
might be bom. 

III. Life through De-ath in the Political World. 

Passing on to still another field, let us observe that 
no great political or national achievement, no great 
civil victory, has ever been won except at the cost of 
life. Slavery became a thing of the past in America, 
but the best blood of the South, and the best blood of 
the North, were shed that the black man might be 
free. Some of you who sit before me have wandered 
over the historic field of Antietam in my own native 
Maryland. The green grass grows in luxuriance to- 
day around the old Dunkard church which seems so 
peaceful and still as you walk around it. There are 
little blue flowers growing in the grass all about you. 
Sit down upon the door steps of the old church and 
look out over the green fields before you and tell me 
what you see. "Nothing," you say, "except the grass 
fields and the landscape dotted with homes, and the 
rugged heights of the South Mountain looming up be- 

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LIFE THROUGH DEATH 

fore you in the distance." Close your eyes before you, 
and then tell me what you see. If you know the story 
of the place where you are sitting, there will be another 
picture before your eyes. Instead of the green grass, 
you will see acre upon acre of tall swaying corn fields. 
May will have become September. Around you, 
stretching far to the south and far to the north, are 
massed legions of brave men clad in grey. The boom 
of a hundred cannon sounds in your ears. You look 
out over the corn field again, and as far as your eye can 
see you watch a solid phalanx of blue plunging into the 
tasselled sea of corn, and swallowed up save for the 
gleam of bayonets which sparkle like diamonds in 
the sunlight. On they come, company after company, 
regiment after regiment, brigade after brigade: the 
bravest of the sons of the North, led by fighting Joe 
Hooker himself. And then the guns flash in the air, 
and like the rattle of a thousand hail storms, the roar 
of musketry is heard. You watch men wearing the 
blue, and men wearing the grey, throw up their hands, 
and fall dead and dying to the ground. Then the grey 
ranks plunge into the blue in one mad, wild struggle 
to the death. Crash, crash, crash, sound the muskets; 
cries of soldiers in the agony of death ; curses, groans, 
the clatter of the corn stalks as men bear them to the 
ground and writhe upon them in pain and in wretched- 
ness; over all, the parching rays of the sun — these 
things, and a thousand impossible to describe make 
up the story of the struggle of the day. By and by, 
night falls, and the stars look down as though in pity 

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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

upon the dying and the dead who lie in heaps upon 
the field of battle. 

We are a great people, and we are justly proud 
of our greatness, but we should never forget that back 
of it are the tears of widows and orphans, the blood 
and the life of the fathers of our native land. The 
com of wheat which produced American freedom was 
sown on the blood stained fields of Saratoga and Long 
Island. The full blown flower of the American union 
was planted as a seed com in the blood-enriched soil 
of Cold Harbor, and Bloody Lane, and Gettysburg. 
The magnificent fruitage of world-wide democracy 
and peace, which was the goal of our recent world 
war, will grow from the sacrificial blood shed in the 
forest of Argonne and upon the blood-stained soil of 
northern France. Everywhere, alike, the story is one 
of life through death. 

IV. Life through Death in the Spiritual World, 

These illustrations from the physical, social, and 
political spheres, but prepare the way for the higher 
embodiment of the truth in the spiritual and religious 
world. No religion can exist without martyrs ; indeed 
it has been well said that the blood of the martyrs is 
the seed of the church. With possibly one exception, 
tradition records that every one of the twelve apostles 
sealed his devotion to the faith with his blood. Four 
of them, it is said, were crucified. Peter, at Rome, 
with his head downward. Andrew, on the cross which 
has since worn his name, in Greece ; Simon, in Britain, 

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LIFE THROUGH DEATH 

and Bartholomew, by the far-off shores of the Caspian 
Sea. Thomas was stoned to death ; Jude, shot to death 
with arrows ; Mark, dragged Hfeless through the streets 
of Alexandria; Matthew, put to death with the sword 
in Ethiopia. The book of Acts records the martyrdom 
of James the Great in the early period of the church's 
history. John, the one exception to the early list of 
martyrs, was cast into a cauldron of boiling oil, but 
by miraculous intervention his life was spared. 

Most striking of all in this respect is the example 
furnished by the founder of the church, Jesus the 
Christ, himself. Clad in his tremulous robes of hu- 
manity, he shrank from the awful torture of death 
upon the cross. In the garden, he prayed that this cup 
might pass from him, as bitter drops of agony fell from 
his brow. And yet, he realised then, as before, that 
without the sacrifice of his life his work must prove 
a failure. In his own case, no less than in others, the 
corn of wheat had to fall into the ground and die in 
order that it might bring forth much fruit. And the 
corn of wheat planted upon Calvary two thousand 
years ago has borne its abundant harvest in the world- 
wide progress of his teachings. But before the 
crown of stars could be placed upon his brow, he was 
compelled to wear the crown of thorns, and before 
angels could bear him into the heavens upon the mount 
of Ascension, he had to be raised aloft by the brutal 
soldiery upon the cruel tree of the cross. Calvary 
must precede the resurrection ; Gethsemane, the throne 
above all others in the heaven of heavens. 

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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

Since the death of Christ, his church has marched 
forward by similar sacrifices. The martyrdom of 
John Hus, who was burned ahve a century before 
Luther, was the starting point of the Protestant 
Reformation. The fires, which Bloody Mary kindled 
in England to consume the Protestants, were but the 
fore-fruits which proclaimed the advent of religious 
freedom. The intolerant Puritanism of Protestant 
New England paved the way for the most liberal in- 
terpretation of Christianity known in America. 

When Ridley and Latimer were led to the stake to 
be burned for their faith upon that memorable October 
morning of 1555, the dying words of the older man 
were prophetic. "Play the man. Master Ridley," he 
said, as the flames rose around him, "and by God's 
grace we shall light such a candle to-day as shall never 
be put out." That candle was the candle of English 
Protestantism which gave to the world Protestant 
America, and which largely made possible the advent 
of our modern civilisation. 

V. Practical Application of the Principle. 

This principle, so true in a greater way, is of deepest 
significance in our own daily duties and lives. The 
men who succeed in any work are the men who give 
themselves completely to that work. We often say 
that this or the other man is "killing himself" to ac- 
complish some great project. We had better say, that 
if he is going to accomplish it, he will have to give his 

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LIFE THROUGH DEATH 

life for it. The man who does not shrink from put- 
ting his all into a cause runs a good chance of making 
his cause succeed. 

But, after all, the final lesson which I bring to you 
upon this Memorial day is the greatest lesson, for it 
deals with the immeasurable future rather than the 
fleeting life of to-day. The words of the text are of 
supreme importance as teaching, beyond any question, 
the true nature of the resurrection from death. Noth- 
ing about this human life of ours is ever capable of 
being fully explained. The wisest man in the universe 
is like a three-year-old child when we ask him to inter- 
pret any of the deeper facts of life. The man who 
tells us that he understands everything in the world 
is either a madman or a fool, and the man who says 
that he understands anything fully and completely, so 
that there is no mystery left about it, is in exactly the 
same condition. In the school life of the child there 
is a stage when it must accept things without under- 
standing them. By and by it understands. So it is 
with this tangled human existence of ours. Now we 
are only in the germ state; the corn of wheat has not 
yet fallen into the ground; by and by we shall put 
aside the old husk, the new life will spring forth, and 
then we shall understand. Now we see through a 
glass darkly, but then face to face. What the new life 
will be we dare not prophesy any more than the old 
shrivelled grain of wheat might be supposed to fore- 
see the green blade which springs from it. 

These our comrades, brothers, friends, who gave 
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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

their all for their native land are not dead. Nay, 
rather they have found the more abundant life which 
springs from the spirit of sacrifice, of unhesitating de- 
votion, and of complete surrender to a glorious ideal! 



tno] 



THE SUPREME VIRTUE 

(A Sermon for Flag Day) 

TEXT: Job 13:15. (Though he slay me, yet will I trust 
in him.) 

THERE are few good things in the world which 
do not have their bad sides. There is scarcely 
a virtue which does not easily degenerate into a vice, 
or a moral action which may not under other circum- 
stances become immoral. How easy it is for our very 
best qualities to become the parents of our worst we 
all know, or if we do not know, at least our friends 
know. The good man is so well aware of his goodness 
that we catch ourselves half -wishing that he were not 
quite so good as he is; the beautiful woman learns to 
know her own beauty and as a result of that conscious- 
ness becomes less beautiful every day ; the truthful per- 
son is sometimes over-officious about telling all he 
knows when there isn't any need for it to become 
public property, while the tactful and kindly person 
lacks courage to tell the truth when it really ought to 
be told. 

The constant tendency of evil to be present with good 
is a fruitful source of danger where one might least 
expect it. There is, for example, nothing more noble 
than the ideal of the scientist, the constant search for, 

[111] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

and worship of Truth ; the absolute hatred of error of 
every kind; the ceaseless mid-night vigil for the sake 
of making humanity wiser and happier: all these, are 
worthy of the highest admiration. And yet there is a 
canker which sometimes grows out of this exclusive 
devotion to science which turns its beauty into ashes 
and its brightness into shade. 

I. Loyalty, the Supreme Virtue. 

I have referred to the ultra-scientific emphasis upon 
the present occasion because I believe it to be one of 
the most prevalent dangers of our modern age. I 
believe this because it tends to destroy the virtue which 
this day is especially designed to celebrate — the grand 
old virtue of loyalty; loyalty to our country, loyalty 
to our friends, loyalty to our principles, loyalty to 
our God. The text embodies the most beautiful ex- 
pression of loyalty recorded in the literature of the 
world. For ages it has been regarded as the final word 
in devotion. We need the lesson which it conveys to- 
day perhaps to an even greater degree than we have 
needed it in the past. 

Before we discuss loyalty, however, let us see just 
how it is that the scientific training sometimes tends 
to destroy it. Perhaps the matter can be illustrated best 
from a simple case of friendship. You have a very 
dear friend, we will say; you do not know all the 
secrets of his heart, you do not know all the actions 
he has committed, nor, if you are a true friend, do 
you want to know them ; you want something that you 
can take on faith. Perhaps some one accuses your 

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THE SUPREME VIRTUE 

friend falsely to you and you reply at once^ with in- 
dignation, "The charge is false!" "How do you 
know?" says the calumniator, "you were not there!" 
"No," you reply, "but he is my friend; I know him, I 
believe in him, and you cannot make me believe that he 
did such a thing!" Now all of this is very unscientific, 
for science would have said "suspend your judgment 
until the testimony is all in; then weigh the evidence 
and decide accordingly." But it is just the peculiar 
beauty and value of friendship that it would spurn the 
introduction of evidence ; once you go to weighing your 
appreciation of those you love, just as sugar and coffee 
are weighed out, then it is time for you to write an 
obituary of your friendship and you can't write it too 
soon. The friendship which has to have proof before 
it will grant confidence; which says, "Let me have a 
spyglass that I may peer into the innermost recesses 
of your heart in order to see whether you are a rascal 
or not" : this sort of friendship may be safe in a busi- 
ness way but it is a misnomer to use the word "friend" 
in connection with it. It is the feeling which a banker 
ordinarily has toward his patrons, whom he gauges, 
very properly for his business, according to their wealth 
or ability to pay. But this business, scientific feeling 
isn't friendship; it has no element of loyalty or trust 
about it, and these are needed before one can have a 
friend. 

II. Loyalty in the Animal Creation. 

Loyalty is one of the virtues which is so deeply inter- 
woven with the whole fabric of existence that we find 

[113] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

striking examples of it even among the lower animals. 
It is, in fact, the most shining of all the good qualities 
which have so justly endeared many of our animal 
companions to humanity. The history of the dog 
family, the most intelligent of all the animal creation 
next to man, is replete w^ith illustrations of loyalty to 
master or friend. You remember, for instance, the 
little pet of the ill-fated Mary, Queen of Scots, who 
when her mistress was led out to execution, clung to 
her and fought with all of its tiny power to remain with 
her even after her head had been severed from her 
body. I think that next to the consolation which the 
ill-starred queen doubtless received from her religion, 
in that gloomy hour, must have been the satisfaction 
which was afforded her by the devotion of this poor 
little animal. 

There is another well-authenticated record of a dog 
who when his master, who was a hunter, accidentally 
shot himself, remained in the woods guarding the 
spot, although he had neither food nor water for three 
days. At the last, he had to be shot before he could 
be taken away. Charles Darwin, who was probably 
the most thorough scientist that ever lived, displays 
more emotion in narrating an instance of similar 
loyalty in the dog than I know of him doing anywhere 
else. He tells in one of his books of a physician who 
owned a dog and, moved by that supra-scientific spirit 
which is the parent of vivisection, he placed the little 
creature upon the operating table. After enduring tor- 
ture for hours, the poor animal, just before it died, 
finding an opportunity, turned its head and extending 

[114] 



THE SUPREME VIRTUE 

its tongue licked the hand of its cruel master. And 
Darwin, cold-blooded scientist as he was, in commen- 
ting on the incident says that it was a picture to haunt a 
man's memory to his dying day. It is questionable 
whether there is any case in the annals of human devo- 
tion which more completely and perfectly illustrates 
the meaning of the text : ^Though he slay me, yet will 
I trust in him." 

III. Loyalty cmwng Men, 

What is true of the lower animals is also true as 
you advance farther in the scale. Savages, who hardly 
know any other virtue, know enough to be true to their 
chief or true to their dan. The savage Britons clung 
to Queen Boadicea to the last even after suffering re- 
peated defeats at the hands of the iron legions of 
Rome. I do not know of more brilliant fidelity any- 
where in the annals of history than that which has been 
displayed by the followers of Mohammed, and it is 
chiefly this trait which has made Mohammedanism 
such a power in the world, crude and barbaric as it 
is in many other respects. Rudyard Kipling, in his 
famous ballad entitled "Fuzzy Wuzzy" bears tribute 
to the significance of Mohammedan loyalty: 

*'So *ere's to you, Fuzzy Wuzzy, at your 'ome in the Soudan, 
You're a pore benighted 'eathen, but a first class fighten' 

man. 
And 'ere's to you. Fuzzy Wuzzy, with your *ayrick 'ead of 

'air — 
You big, black boundin' beggar — for you broke a British 
square." 

[115] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

What was it about "Fuzzy Wuzzy" that made him a 
first class fighting man and enabled him to break a 
British square. Not a thing in the world but his deter- 
mined loyalty to the cause for which he was fighting. 
The presence of this one virtue transformed the black, 
unkempt, savage, benighted heathen, as Kipling styles 
him, into a genuine hero, even in the eyes of his op- 
ponents in the British army. 

As a matter of fact, however, whether a civilised or 
uncivilised loyalty is the one transcendently brilliant 
diamond which the dark setting of war has always 
shown off with the greatest brilliancy, to say a soldier 
is tmswervingly loyal is to pay him the highest compli- 
ment in the military vocabulary, and to say he is dis- 
loyal is to say the worst thing that you can say of him 
in a military way. All the great captains of the world 
were siu-rounded by a soldiery loyal to the core. The 
great French general Turenne, who won so many vic- 
tories, was familiarly styled "Father Turenne" in his 
camp and his soldiers were incessantly watching over 
his welfare. In the frightful battle of Liitzen, where 
Gustavus Adoiphus, the lion of Sweden, lost his life, 
when the king fell from his horse, wounded to death, 
the soldiers threw themselves in heaps over his body, 
each one determined to die with his master. 

Perhaps no man ever inspired more of the sentiment 
of loyalty among his fofiowers than Napoleon Buona- 
parte, as selfish a man as I am compelled to believe him 
in the main. His new conscripts fought with the deter- 
mined loyalty of old soldiers. Marshal Ney broke his 
oath to the Bourbons because he could not find it in 

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THE SUPREME VIRTUE 

his heart to be disloyal to his old master. When 
Napoleon was banished to St. Helena, men fought for 
the privilege of going into a lonely exile with him. 
But not only warriors are recorded as arousing the 
sentiment of loyalty among their followers. Almost 
all the leaders of men in civil life have had a similar 
experience. Pitt and Fox and Sheridan had friends 
who swore by them and our own Henry Clay was not- 
able among other distinguished leaders of the American 
populace for the loyalty of his personal following. 
Every great leader in fact arouses the sentiment of 
loyalty. The proof of his greatness may be found in 
this fact rather than in any other. 

IV. Loyalty to Country, 

Flag day is an occasion upon which we are especially 
called to emphasise the virtue of loyalty to our own 
nation. This loyalty should, of course, be thoughtful 
and of such type as to cause our nation and our flag to 
be honoured and respected throughout the earth. The 
best way to do this is to see to it that as a nation we 
embody the ideals of the Founder of our religion to 
the end that our example may inspire others to do the 
same thing. 

George Lansbury, in his exceedingly stimulating 
little volume, entitled "These Things Shall Be," calls 
attention to the fact that no great nation has yet be- 
come so thoroughly Christianised as to be able to 
become a real missionary to other nations. I can con- 
ceive of no higher loyalty to America than to resolve 

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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

to do all in our power to make her just such a nation. 
The highest type of loyalty is the loyalty which insists 
upon only the noblest and best career possible for those 
to whom we are loyal. We must be jealous of the 
good name of our country, so jealous that we dare not 
allow her to besmirch that good name by injustice, or 
oppression, or unfairness, or anything else which our 
individual conscience cannot approve. There is a petty 
loyalty which does not think of higher things; which 
says "my country, right or wrong," instead of saying, 
as it should, "my country, to be followed when right, 
and to be set right when wrong." 

V. The Final Loyalty. 

The ultimate and final loyalty of any human being 
must be to his ultimate and final ideal which means, 
of course, his God. Sometimes, men have made the 
state their final ideal and have thus converted patriot- 
ism into religion. Certain German teachers before the 
world war held to this philosophy. It is a dangerous 
theory because it makes central something which, while 
it deserves a high place, does not deserve the highest 
position in a man's thought or life. It is the teaching 
of the Scriptures throughout that we must love the 
Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, 
with all our mind, and with all our strength. The Old 
Covenant laid down as its first requirement that no 
other God should enter into rivalry with Jehovah for 
the affections of his people. Everywhere the story is 
the same. Our highest loyalty must be God : Anything 

[118] 



THE SUPREME VIRTUE 

else than the highest means that we have no loyalty 
at all. 

There are two propositions that our practical sense 
teaches us must be true: First, man is by nature a 
religious being, and second, there is but one religion 
which calls out the highest and the best that our human 
nature embodies. These statements are made with only 
the most courteous reference to all other religions. 
The greatest danger to-day is not from those who 
have intellectual difficulties concerning Christianity, but 
it is rather the danger which arises from the habit of 
fickleness, from the prevalent under-tow of disloyalty 
which sweeps away so many thousands of men and 
women. It is not that we are dissatisfied with our 
flag, but simply that we have gotten ourselves into 
that frame of mind which will not permit us to be truly 
loyal to anything. And so, after a time, we are blown 
about by every wind under heaven and we are not 
sure that we owe allegiance to anybody or to anything. 
We are lost in the true sense and we are lost because 
of our disloyalty. 

There are many people, in this modern age, who 
seem to think that there is something noble about the 
sort of independence which is ready to leave an old 
service at any time and pick up a new one ; which goes 
before its commander with a chip on its shoulder, and 
which says, "I will leave you when I like, and I will 
obey you when I please." But for my own part, 
I must confess that this spirit appears the reverse of 
admirable. Of all the men in the world there are none 
so hopelessly useless and disappointing as those upon 
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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

whom one is never able to lay his fingers. There is 
no habit so dangerous, either for this world, or for 
the next, as the habit of fickleness. At all costs, have 
some sort of principles and stick to them. Be loyal 
to somebody or to something. One of the most beauti- 
ful of the old Greek stories is the legend of Antigone, 
who, when her brother fell in battle, because the victor 
had issued a solemn decree that anyone should be 
buried alive who attempted place the body in a sepul- 
chre and no one would risk the danger, at last went 
herself and yielded up her own life that her brother's 
dead body might have the benefit of the last rites of his 
religion. The story is very old, and has been immor- 
talised by the genius of Sophocles, but it remains fra- 
grant and inspiring even to-day. In Christian litera- 
ture, there is no more beautiful picture than that which 
is presented in the action of those women who watched 
heart-sick by the cross and went early in the morning to 
the sepulchre. What a contrast between them and the 
traitor, Judas, who embodies the Biblical type of dis- 
loyalty! Even a bad cause is illumined by the loyalty 
of its followers, while a good cause is glorified there- 
by. In all the annals of religious history there is no 
crown for the traitor, and no garlands for his memory. 
The crown is always to the one who overcomes, who 
endures to the end, who is faithful and loyal even unto 
death! 



[120] 



XI 

THE UNREAD LESSONS OF LIFE 

(A Commencement Sermon) 

TEXT: Luke io\26, "How Readest Thou?" 

THE question propounded in the text is of interest 
both by reason of association and of its own 
practical meaning and import. A certain lawyer, skilled 
in the knowledge of the Prophets and in all the tradi- 
tions of the Jews, stands up and tempts the Christ with 
a query as old as history itself : the never-ending prob- 
lem of the ages, "Master, what shall I do to inherit 
eternal life?" In reply, the Master, with one of those 
flashes of delicate irony, which exhibit his power most 
fully, propounds a counter-question : ",What is written 
in the law?'* he says, "How readest thou?" 

Now, this man was a lawyer. Not only had he read 
the law, but as his apt power of quotation indicates, he 
had it practically at his tongue's end. He was doubt- 
less familiar with the text and every shade of formal 
interpretation. From his lofty standpoint of technical 
scholarship, he no doubt looked down upon the Naz- 
arene carpenter who presumed to instruct one so 
learned as himself. But in a few moments, through 
the power of a simple illustration, the immortal parable 
of the Good Samaritan, vanquished and crestfallen he 

[121] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

retires from the fray. He is forced to admit, tacitly, 
if not otherwise, that he had never read, in the true 
sense, the Law and the Prophets which parrot-Hke, he 
could repeat by rote. 

The race of lawyers of the kind mentioned in the 
text is not yet extinct. In the universal library of 
the Creator, there are many books provided for the 
instruction and profit of the sons of men. With 
these volumes, all of us are more or less familiar. 
Many of their pages have been committed to memory; 
some of us, perhaps, know even the foot-notes to the 
text. Yet, after all, our lives, which are the only 
real tests of the true extent of our knowledge, indicate, 
too often, I fear, that we have not read them in the 
true sense of the word. 

I. The Book of Nature. 

There is first the great book of Nature : The lesson 
of the sunshine and the clouds ; of the passing of the 
rose, and of the fading of the violet; of the withered 
leaves of autumn and the budding foliage of spring. 
.What do we read in the rapid succession of birth and 
death in the plant and animal creation all about us? 
Perhaps, few of us like Shakespeare, can find sermons 
in stones or books in the running brooks, and fewer 
still, like Shelley, the divine whisperings of prophecy 
in the sighing of the western wind, but all of us, from 
the least to the greatest, should find some lesson of 
importance in the book of the flowers and the stars. 
Consider, if you will, the course of a single day; how 

[122] 



THE UNREAD LESSONS OF LIFE 

it begins in gladness and life, in the morning; how 
it goes on to the meridian of heat and life, and, how 
in the haze of the afternoon, it slowly fades away until 
the shades of evening fall. Is there not in its passing 
a suggestion of the transitory nature of life and the 
coldness of the tomb? It is as though God has given 
us the very days themselves, with their various phases 
so strikingly parallel to the course of life as a whole, 
to remind us, with every setting of the sun that soon we 
too shall have run our race and soon the grave shall 
have received us into its bosom. But the days come, 
and the days go, and the lesson of the day remains 
unheeded. "How readest thou?" my careless friend, 
in the volume of the hours. 

Again, there is a chapter in the book of Nature de- 
voted to the flowers. "Flowers," said Henry Ward 
Beecher, "are the sweetest things God ever made and 
forgot to put a soul into." What a lesson there is in 
a simple blade of grass ; a lesson which Moses has put 
into the solemn words of the ninetieth psalm: "In 
the morning they are like grass which groweth up. In 
the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the 
evening it is cut down and withereth." So too, there is 
something singularly pathetic in the life and death of a 
rose. Delicately, it puts forth its leaves under the 
influence of heat and moisture; slowly, and little by 
little, the exquisite bud is born, and then each day 
new graces come with the dawning of the suns, until, 
at last, beneath the kisses of the dew and the smiles of 
the stars, the full-orbed rose bursts into life. Life, 

[123] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

alas, soon to be followed by death, for the seeds of 
dissolution were sown in the moment of its perfect 
bloom. How the rose seems to say to you, if you 
will listen to her words; "as is my life, so shall be 
yours; however beautiful, or wise, or brilliant you may 
be." "How readest thou?" my youthful friend, in 
God's book of the flowers. 

Again, there is another chapter in the book of Nature 
devoted to the animal creation, as distinguished from 
the plant and the vegetable. Here, the most important 
section is that which deals with man. There is no 
study quite so interesting as the study of personality. 
There is more in a human face, than there is in a hun- 
dred manuscripts. There is more in the throbbing 
pulsing heart-life of the humblest man or woman that 
ever lived than there is in the roar of the ocean, or the 
majesty of the mountains or the hills. Men with their 
passions and their sins; men with their blunders and 
their mistakes ; men rising to the heights of heaven on 
the wings of poetry and song, and men sinking to the 
depths of hell in the dens of vice and shame. Over 
the graves of our friends, are there no inscriptions of 
warning for us? Does the funeral procession passing 
"with dirges due in sad array," arouse in us no thought 
of a similar procession in which we shall figure, not as 
the mourner, but, perchance as the person mourned? 
"How readest thou?" O careless sceptic, in the book 
of the lives of men, well may it be for you, if with 
the soothsayer of Anthony and Cleopatra you can say: 
"In nature's infinite book of secrecy, a little I can read." 

[124] 



THE UNREAD LESSONS OF LIFE 

IL The Book of Conscience, 

Time bids us close the volume of Nature and take 
up another book from the universal library of God. 
This time it will be the book of Conscience; the Law 
of the Inner Life. What means the sting of remorse; 
the feeling of self-condemnation and shame? Is there 
not something strange about this inner monitor which, 
with no visible appearance whatever, has forced strong 
men to suicide, and has driven its possessor to the 
gallows by a voluntary confession of guilt? One of 
the most striking criminal cases in the early history of 
the United States was that of the murder of Captain 
White of New England. An old man, without an 
enemy in the world, one night he was murdered in his 
bed for the purpose of robbery. No eye, save the un- 
sleeping eye of Jehovah, saw the murderer as by the 
light of the moon he lifted his victim's arm across his 
breast and plunged the fatal dagger into his heart. 
The deed was accomplished with such precaution that 
no suspicion fell upon the murderer. Unknown and 
unsuspected, he walked among his companions and was 
safe from the scrutiny of man. But a Power greater 
than that of detectives or magistrates pursued him, 
In his waking hours, he saw a knife, blood-red to the 
hilt, ever before his eyes, and whenever he fell asleep 
it was always to dream of the moonlight ; not the moon, 
as it had appeared in the days before his hands had 
become the hands of a murderer, peaceful and serene, 
but rather blood-red, like the sun half-hidden behind 
a cloud. At last, the struggle becomes unendurable 

[125] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

and then the suicide of the unhappy wretch proves his 
confession of guilt. Conscience has a thousand several 
tongues, and all of them inform against the guilty soul 
of the criminal. They speak of obligation to some 
Higher Power; they speak of judgment, of sin, of 
condemnation. If no other book were open to our 
gaze, the book of Conscience alone would furnish 
sufficient evidence to make us think seriously of the 
warning it conveys. "How readest thou?" my brother, 
careless about the future, in the book of thine own 
conscience, and the moral nature of man. 

III. The Book of History. 

A third book in the universal library of God is the 
great book of History — men's doings and lives since 
the story of the ages began. There is no study more 
profitable than history if it be studied as it should be: 
there is no study so profitless as history, if it be 
studied as it usually is. The mere knowledge of names 
and dates is, for the most part, an encumbrance to the 
mind and a weariness to the soul. Nevertheless, to 
him who reads aright, history furnishes some splendid 
lessons. Dionysius of Caria, the old Greek philosopher, 
said truthfully that history is only philosophy teach- 
ing by examples. One of the most striking lessons of 
past experience is what may be styled the significance 
of the unnoticed in human experience. It is the little 
things, the unnoticed things, the unread lessons which 
have always determined destiny. 

We talk, sometimes, of the insignificance of speech 
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THE UNREAD LESSONS OF LIFE 

and the trifling value of a syllable, and yet the tragedies 
of the past and of the present, nay, the history of the 
future that is to be; the sublime heights of a heaven 
and the awful depths of a hell, have more than once 
been held fast-bound within the charmed circle of mor- 
tal accents. Nations have trembled at the power of an 
unspoken word. There was an hour in the life of 
Rome, the mistress of the world, when her last army 
lay crushed upon the field of battle; when her sword 
was shivered for the third time by the Punic legions ; 
when out of eighty thousand in the morning scarcely 
seventy soldiers rode back with Varro in the shades of 
evening; when the courage of tribune and the daring 
of dictator could not hope to defend the walls of a city 
stripped of all its warriors ; when the Fates seemed to 
have cut the thread of national existence and the sun of 
glory and of victory to have set amid the carnage of 
Cannae's fatal field. Then, in that hour, fraught with 
peril and dangers and death, there came an unexpected 
salvation only through the order that was never given, 
through the word that was left unspoken, and Rome, 
Rome with all her significance for future ages, Rome 
was saved because Hannibal shook his head ! 

There is nothing little in the annals of life or of na- 
ture. Some trifling word, a careless blow, a simple 
smile, a feather blown before the wind, have formed 
before, may form again, links in the massive chain of 
Fate which stretches unto all eternity. Be it the sar- 
casm of a Maintenon, making untold orphans in the 
sunny vales of France; be it the sword-thrust of a 
Martd, saving civilisation and Christianity from the 
[1271 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

hordes of Moslem invaders ; be it the angehc smile of 
a Genevieve, averting from Paris the dreadful conse- 
quences of a barbarian's v/rath; in all, through all, 
there rises a veil of perfumed incense to heaven, and 
on the broad expanse of the firmament we can trace the 
glorification of the almighty power of little things. 

IV. The Book of Revelation. 

Once more, and for the last time this morning, we 
turn to the universal library of God and pluck forth 
a volume. This one is entitled the book of Revelation 
or of Revealed Truth. Its contents are more direct 
and plain than are those of any of the others we have 
seen, so far as the most important issues of destiny are 
concerned. It has survived the rage of persecution 
and the hostile sneers of criticism. It contains the 
story of a life like no other life and a history which 
is unique among the chronicles of man. The King of 
Heaven throws aside his glory and descends to earth 
to live the life of a peasant and to die the death of a 
slave upon the cross. He suffers indignities of every 
kind, he submits to cruel treatment and scourging: 
He, the King of Glory and one with the Eternal God 
Himself. Was all this done being needless or a matter 
of no particular value ? Do we not, when we lessen the 
danger from sin, lessen the value of the cross? It is 
easy to talk in smooth-flowing phrases about the uni- 
versal salvation of mankind, regardless of effort or 
character, but the bitter suffering in the garden and 
the cry of agony upon Calvary, speak of something 

[128] 



THE UNREAD LESSONS OF LIFE 

more serious, and a danger not imaginary but real. 
We may not like to think of the rapids ; we may refuse 
to believe that they exist ; but when those who love us 
give their lives to warn us of the danger, if we perish, 
with whom lies the condemnation? 

The book of Revealed Truth contains three lessons 
of especial significance for the consideration of every 
human being. These three lessons may be stated in 
the following language: First, God is Love; second. 
Sin is Death ; and third, there is a Judgment. 

The first of these lessons is not revealed in any of 
the books which have just been considered. Stamped 
on every page of the book of Nature, we can read these 
words: "God is Power"; indelibly written upon the 
tablets of the human heart and of the human con- 
science, there is likewise engraved the sentence: "God 
is Justice"; but only in the book of Revealed Truth do 
we find in clear and unmistakable terms the sublime 
message that God is Love. It is only through the In- 
carnation that the goodness of God can be proved. 
God is love because Jesus Christ is God, and Jesus was 
the perfect embodiment of love in the realm of human 
experience. 

The book of Revealed Truth emphasises in a very 
special way the reality of sin and the danger of its 
consequences. Simple and plain as its language is 
upon this all-important theme, too often it is not read. 
Dishonesty among those in high position, scandals in 
every department of life; corruption and vice on the 
part of those who profess their faith in the church: 
these things would be impossible if men read the book 
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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

of Revelation. Our modern age does not like to read 
passages like these : "The wages of sin is death," and 
"The soul that sinneth it shall die" ; hence men make 
a Bible to suit themselves, and cut out what does not 
fit. But the Book stands the test of the scissors as it 
has already stood the test of the flames; it lives, and 
some day, by its teaching its critics shall be judged. A 
man does not remove the sun by putting out his own 
eyes. He no longer sees, it is true ; but the sun is still 
there. So a man may refuse to believe God's message 
in whole or in part, but its truthfulness is not affected 
by his refusal to accept it. If he sins, and remains in 
his sins, he shall die; whether he believes there is such a 
thing as death or not. The Pharisaical life, no less 
than the sneer of the sceptic, or the lukewarm in- 
difference of the average man of the world find no 
comfort in the pages of revelation. 

Last of all, the book of Revealed Truth contains a 
lesson of Judgment. There is a picture drawn by the 
Son of God himself of that scene when amid the 
thunders of heaven and the collapse of a universe of 
stars, the Son of man shall come with all the holy 
angels and with great power and glory. Doubtless, 
this language is to be interpreted in harmony with the 
oriental imagery which characterises so much of the 
Scriptures, and yet it certainly conveys a sublime 
truth. If there is a moral order in the world, that 
order demands that absolute justice shall be done, 
sometime, somewhere, and we know that absolute 
justice is not done in the round of our material exist- 
ence. Immanuel Kant, the most profound of modern 
£130] 



THE UNREAD LESSONS OF LIFE 

philosophers, has based his proof of immortality upon 
this fact. Here, at any rate, he is in harmony with 
Scriptural teaching. There is no fact more clearly or 
explicitly stated in the pages of the New Testament 
than the fact of a final judgment. 

But the time for closing the books has come. To 
you who stand upon the threshold of active participa- 
tion in the busy affairs of life the lesson of morning 
must be clear and obvious. Whether yoii succeed or 
fail in the supreme business of existence will depend 
upon how you read the lessons of both past and present 
experience. If you go down to defeat and failure in 
the end, it will not be because there have been no 
warnings given you; it will be because you have re- 
fused to read the plainest and clearest messages of 
your Maker. May your record be such that at the close 
of the day you may be able to incarnate those words 
of the author of Thanatopsis : 

"So live, that when thy summons comes 

To join the innumerable caravan that moves to that mys- 
terious realm 

Where each shall take his place within the silent halls of 
death 

Thou go not like the quarry slave at night 

Scourged to his dungeon. But sustained and soothed 

By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave 

Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch about him 

And lies down to pleasant dreams." 



[ISl] 



XII 

THE LIFE WORTH WHILE 

(A Commencement Address) 

THE history of success, and the history of failure 
is the history of the same thing viewed from two 
different standpoints. Whether the landscape before 
you is tinged with blue, or covered with green ; whether 
the horizon appears clear or darkened with clouds, 
may depend entirely upon the colour of the glasses 
which are placed before your eyes. If you wear green 
glasses, everything will look green, if you wear blue 
glasses, everything will look blue; and sometimes I 
have thought that there are some people who make 
a specialty of wearing blue glasses all of their lives. 
In much the same way, if you want to know what 
a young man is going to make out of life, all you need 
to know is the standpoint from which he habitually 
looks at the world, and himself as a member of it. Is it 
simply a playground in his eyes; or is it a workshop? 
Is it a place to make money ; or to have a good time ? 
Is it an orderly universe; or is it all a strange, mixed 
up, inexplicable chaos, of which, he himself, is the 
most inexplicable feature? 

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THE LIFE WORTH WHILE 

L The Proper Viewpoint, 

The attitude one takes toward the questions just 
mentioned will largely determine his life, but the mas- 
ter influence of all will be his attitude toward this 
question: "Is my daily life an end in itself, or is it a 
means to a higher end?" Or, as the theologians are 
fond of putting it, am I living for a time, or am I living 
for eternity?'* 

It would seem rather unnecessary, upon an occasion 
such as this, to mention in any questioning sort of way 
the age-old theme of personal immortality. Outside 
of juvenile debating societies and metaphysical class 
rooms, we are satisfied, for the most part, to let what 
has been said on the subject, and there has certainly 
been enough said, suffice without addition or comment. 
We no longer regard it as a question in dispute. It is 
a part of our religion, it is presupposed in our laws, 
it enters as a matter of fact, into our entire social 
fabric; and yet, when one looks at the daily life of the 
average man, it is •an open question as to whether he 
really believes it, or is only trying to delude himself, 
as well as others, into the idea that he does. 

This may seem like strong language, but, I ask you 
frankly, is it not justified by the facts? Do you think, 
for instance, that if a man were absolutely and 
thoroughly convinced that the character which he is 
building every hour and every day, just as surely as 
a mason builds a house, brick by brick ; that this char- 
acter is something which will last forever, — do you 
suppose, I say, if he believed this, that he would 
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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

have told the falsehood he did tell for the slight gain 
he hoped would result from it, only an hour before ? If 
a young man were absolutely sure that the impression 
which he knows, the books which he habitually reads 
are producing upon his mind is something he will have 
to carry about him forever, do you suppose that he 
would read the questionable literature which he does? 
What is true of the careless falsehood and the vulgar 
book, is just as true of the obscene jest and the immoral 
life. There is always a good deal of intellectual scep- 
ticism in the world but it is never a tithe of the practical 
scepticism which exists. There are people, for ex- 
ample, who repeat the Apostles' Creed with unction 
and fervour, and who, so far as their intellects are con- 
cerned, are no doubt sincere when they say that they 
believe in the resurrection of the body and the life 
everlasting, who, nevertheless, in their actual lives 
are neither better nor worse than if they were disciples 
of Paine or Voltaire. They are not theoretical but 
they are practical sceptics. To them might be applied 
the language of one of the great masters of English 
prose upon another occasion : "what you are speaks so 
loud I cannot hear what you say." 

This practical scepticism is nowhere more apparent 
or more disastrous than when it influences the choice of 
an ideal for life. The tendency of the modern age 
appears to be to discount the practical value of belief 
in a future life. A great many of our modern edu- 
cators for example, leave the question of personal im- 
mortality entirely in abeyance. They build for time 
exclusively; they lay no foundation for eternity. But, 

[1S4] 



THE LIFE WORTH WHILE 

if it be true, that the soul is immortal, then assuredly 
the supreme question which every educator ought to 
have in view is this: "How can I mould the plastic 
mind which is placed in my hand so that it will develop 
into something that is really worthy of immortality?" 
It is a Hght matter, and a comparatively easy one, to 
educate with reference to a particular business, or a 
particular profession, so far as this world goes, but to 
play the architect for a structure that is to last forever : 
this is an entirely different thing. And yet every 
parent, and every teacher is doing this consciously or 
unconsciously day after day. The first and most im- 
portant step toward realising the life worth while is 
therefore to resolve that everything said and every- 
thing done shall be said or done with the ideal of 
personal immortality thoroughly before the mind. 

II. The Ethical Ideal. 

It is a great thing to get the right viewpoint, and 
to stick to it, but this is only the beginning of the prob- 
lem. Granted, in a general way, that our rule shall 
be always to have in mind the ideal of making some- 
thing out of our lives that shall be worthy of immor- 
tality, the next question is, along what specific lines 
shall we proceed in order to make our ideal real in our 
own lives? 

First in time, and first in importance I unhesitatingly 

affirm is the training of the Will; the formation of 

character. The teacher, for example, who teaches for 

eternity, rather than for time, will have no patience 

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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

with the education which is purely intellectual, or which 
is even primarily so. The education upon which he 
will insist will be ethical through and through, and 
there will be no uncertain ring about its ethics either. 
The great trouble with most of our modern systems 
of training is that they do not treat the ethical question 
as though it were as important as the intellectual. 
When their graduates go out into the world they are 
smart enough but they are not upright enough. They 
have sufficient brains to secure a position, in a city 
bank, but they do not have sufficient character to keep 
them from stealing several thousands of dollars of its 
funds as happened in a case I recall a few years ago. 
Now there is not much hope for an ethical bankrupt 
in time, but there is even less for him in eternity. His 
intellectual ability has nothing whatever to do with it. 
There is no name in the long line of English jurispru- 
dence which is so cordially detested and abhorred as 
the name of George Jeffreys. It is 'not because he 
was a dullard or a weakling, for he possessed an in- 
tellectual acumen which would have been a credit to any 
lawyer of his day. But he was a moral bankrupt on the 
side of humanity. He scented blood like a tiger; his 
courtroom was the den of a wild beast, and when he 
entered it to take his seat, half intoxicated, his cheeks 
on fire, his eyes staring like a madman, even the bold- 
est pleader was helpless before him. He ordered the 
court hall when he held sessions at Dorchester, after 
the Monmouth rebellion, to be hung with scarlet, and 
condemned the widow of a member of Parliament, 
Alice Lisle, by name, to be burned to death simply be- 

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THE LIFE WORTH WHILE 

cause she had given food and drink to two weary- 
soldiers of the Rebel army. At a sitting of a few days 
at another place he sentenced two hundred and ninety- 
two people to be hanged. He died at the age of forty- 
one in the Tower, the state prison of England, where 
he had been sent at his own request that he might not 
be torn in pieces by the people. "At his death," says 
Macaulay, "he was hated by all classes with a hatred 
which is without a parallel in English history." As- 
suredly, there must have been something wrong with 
the ideal of life of a man who could die at the age 
of forty-one, leaving such a record behind him, after 
having been Chief Justice of the King's Bench at 
thirty-five, and Lord Chancellor of England at thirty- 
seven. 

Jeffreys was a moral bankrupt on the side of hu- 
manity. There was a brilliant American of the same 
profession who was a bankrupt on the side of fidelity. 
When Aaron Burr graduated at Princeton College 
nearly a century and a half ago, he made a record 
for scholarship which has never since been equalled in 
the history of the college. No more brilliant genius 
was ever born on American soil If Aaron Burr had 
possessed the strength of character to have matched 
his intellect, there is scarcely a doubt but that his name 
would stand to-day as high as any name in American 
history. But Burr was a moral bankrupt. He was 
faithful to but one thing throughout his life and that 
thing was his own ambition. He violated at will the 
most sacred ties of nature and society; he gambled on 
the virtue of his innocent acquaintances ; and he never 
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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

made a promise in all his life except with the idea of 
breaking it, if he believed it would pay him to break it. 
He died at last at an advanced age, a ruined and broken 
man, leaving such a record behind him that it was 
with difficulty that his ashes were allowed to rest in 
the burying place of his father. In the old Princeton 
cemetery there lies a plain marble slab, now half 
chipped away by the relic hunters. On this slab there 
is the following simple inscription ; 

AARON BURR 
A Colonel In The Army Of The Revolution 
And Vice President Of The United States. 

The tradition used to be current during my school 
days at Princeton that the body which sleeps beneath 
that tombstone was placed there after night, for the 
simple reason that it would not have been permitted to 
have been placed there in the daylight. 

Jeffreys and Burr were lawyers; with them, I wish 
now to link the name of one of the greatest philosophers 
of the ages, the founder of modern science: Francis 
Bacon. Bacon was not inhuman, like Jeffreys, nor 
faithless like Burr, but he was so weak on the question 
of money that he tarnished one of the most brilliant 
careers in the annals of history with a stain which 
his most indulgent biographers cannot wipe away. It 
is pitiful to think that a man with such transcendent 
genius could condescend to accept the miserable bribes 
which were offered him, but we have his own confes- 
sion that he did so. Hence it comes that for Bacon, 
the scientist, and for Bacon, the philosopher, all ages 

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THE LIFE WORTH WHILE 

will have respect and reverence, but for Francis Bacon, 
the man, there will only be more or less of pity mingled 
with more or less of disgust. 

In comparison with the genius of the three men I 
have just mentioned, the name of William Wilberforce 
sinks into insignificance; and yet, after his death, a 
grateful people erected a monument to his memory 
upon which was inscribed the following epitaph, an 
epitaph which is worth remembering: ''The eloquence 
of his silver tongue has ceased, but the eloquence of his 
noble deeds will live fOrever." 

There are a good many people who laugh at Puri- 
tanical ideas of morality, and yet these same people 
never sleep half so well, when they are in a strange 
country as they do when they are lodged in the house 
of a Puritan. It is because of the integrity of the men 
whom they pretend to despise that they are enabled to 
go to rest at night without the apprehension of being 
robbed of all they possess. As Woodrow Wilson used 
to put it in his classroom : "some men possess integrity 
of character and all men get the benefit of what some 
men are." 

The experiment of non-ethical education has been 
tried among nations and it has been tried among in- 
dividuals, and it has failed often enough for people 
to think seriously of discontinuing it. The great diffi- 
culty with the ancient Greek civilisation was its de- 
fective ethics. So far as philosophy and art are con- 
cerned, the culture of Greece will probably never be 
surpassed, but its religious system deified thieves, 
drunkards, and murderers, and placed an adulterer on 
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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

the throne of Olympus. Certain modem nations ap- 
pear to be following in the same pathway, and if this 
should prove true, they are destined to end at the same 
goal. The polite and cultured Parisian shrugs his 
shoulders in wonder at the Puritanism of his neigh- 
bours across the Channel, but when he consults the sta- 
tistics of the population and growth of his native land, 
he finds that it is retrograding at a rapid rate, and that, 
from the present outlook, it is only a question of time, 
when it will be swept out of existence in the great 
struggle for survival among the nations. 

It makes no difference what theory of morals we 
accept; whether we regard morality as the voice of 
God in the soul of man, or whether we regard it as 
the product of innumerable experiences inherited and 
preserved through an indefinite period of time; the 
fact remains that the man or woman who discounts the 
ethical element in his life is gambling his or her future, 
both for time and for eternity upon the most frightful 
risk conceivable by man. If it be true that the moral 
consciousness is of divine origin, then our action in 
defying it amounts to defying the Almighty, in the 
very Holy of Holies of his Sanctuary. If, on the 
contrary, it be true that morality is only the product 
of innumerable experiences inherited and preserved 
through an indefinite period of past time, then to defy 
this product means simply to stake one experience 
against uncounted millions of them with the hope that 
the lottery of fortune will turn out the one prize among 
the millions of blanks. 

The master mind of the universe, at least in a literary 

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THE LIFE WORTH WHILE 

way, has drawn three wonderful pictures of men, all 
of them of consummate genius, who tried to defy the 
moral laws of the world and to come off unscathed. 
All of them failed. Richard III, after the most bril- 
liant exhibition of energy and intellectual vigour, falls 
at last on the field of Bosworth and his crown passes 
into the hands of his deadliest enemies. Edmund, in 
the play of King Lear, after plotting against his 
brother and all of his relatives, and after succeeding in 
the most unexampled manner, sinks at last, never to 
rise again. The conclusion of his experience is found 
in the line uttered when he is at the point of death: 
"the wheel has come full circle ; I am here ;" yes, here 
in the dust, with my enemy's sword above my head — 
here at last — the wheel has come full circle ! lago, in 
the play of Othello, the fiend in human form ; the per- 
sonification of what the most brilliant intellect is apt 
to become when unchecked by moral restraint ; the most 
skilfully drawn character of the most skilfully con- 
structed play of the dramatist : he too, at the last, gets 
his reward and sees his finely woven net of villainy 
torn into atoms by the moral power of the universe. 
Nobody, so far as I know, has ever accused Shake- 
speare of writing his plays to prove any great moral 
lesson. Everywhere and by everybody he has always 
been considered as the great copyist of Nature; the man 
who never struck a false note after her, or varied a 
shade in the tints which he painted after her colouring. 
It is no light matter, therefore, that he should have 
drawn three of his greatest characters as men who 
exerted almost Titanic powers of intellect to overcome 

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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

the moral laws of the world, and in every case made 
a miserable failure. 

"Character," says Emerson, "is Nature in the high- 
est form ; it is of no use to ape it, or to contend with it." 
Solomon is still regarded as the sage of all the ages; 
the cherished intellectual idol of three great religions, 
and yet with all his wisdom, by his own confession, his 
life ended miserably and a failure simply because he 
did not think it worth while to obey the moral law. 
"If only Robert Bums had possessed a moral balance," 
says one of his biographers, "what miseries might he 
not have averted for himself, what might he not have 
become for the ages!" I have seen grand old white- 
haired Theodore Cuyler stand in the chapel at Prince- 
ton University and say, after enumerating the ad- 
vantages of the school in an intellectual way; "gentle- 
men, the grandest product of this grand old university 
is a noble Christian character." There is a solidity, 
a reserve power, as Emerson styles it, about the man 
of integrity which is consciously, or unconsciously 
acknowledged by all who come in contact with it. 
Those who do not possess it, pay it the same sort of 
reverence which the demons were wont to pay to the 
Son of God. In times of great trial and perplexity 
they feel safer in the presence of a man who possesses 
this type of character than they do anywhere else. 

Out in the Yosemite valley there is a magnificent 
mountain peak named El Capitan, rising thousands of 
feet into the air, with its base sweeping back into the 
Sierra Nevadas. There are earthquake shocks felt in 
that section, and when the guide is asked what the 

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THE LIFE WORTH WHILE 

people do when they fear the earthquake, he replies; 
"they go back to El Capitan and they stand upon its 
base, for they say that when El Capitan falls, then falls 
the world!" Character is the El Capitan of the little 
world of the individual, and when it falls, then falls his 
world. 

III. The Intellectual I deed. 

But man is not all Will any more than he is all In- 
tellect, and because character is of first and primary 
importance is no reason why of itself it should be all- 
sufficient and complete. A fool is probably of more 
use in the world than a knave, but that is the best that 
can be said of him. No man respects a dullard, even 
though he be of princely birth. "I have tried Prince 
George drunk and I have tried him sober," said King 
James of England, "and drunk or sober, there is 
nothing in him. He is not worth as much as a trooper 
in my guards." Sins of or against the will are 
mostly sins of commission; sins of or against the 
intellect are mostly sins of omission. It is a sin of 
omission of the most grievous type not to develop to 
our utmost power, the intellectual strength which God 
has given us. "This god-like reason," in the words 
of Hamlet was not bestowed upon us "to fust in us 
unused." You doubtless remember, in the same play 
that wonderful catalogue of the powers of man in 
which we are told : "What a piece of work is a man ! 
How noble in reason ! how infinite in faculties ! in form, 
and moving, how express and admirable! in action, 
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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! 
the beauty of the world ! the paragon of animals !" All 
this man is, or may become but in order to become it 
he must develop the intellectual powers which God 
has given him. There is something sublime, I had al- 
most said divine, about the manner in which the mind 
of man can enter into the secrets of all the ages, of 
how it can commune with sages and philosophers in- 
numerable; and thus, with all of his relative insignifi- 
cance, man is enabled to carry the very key to the 
universe within his brain. How admirably the sage 
of Concord has expressed this idea in the opening lines 
of his Essay on History: 

There is no great and no small 
To the Soul that maketh all: 
And where it cometh all things are; 
And it cometh everywhere. 

I am owner of the sphere, 

Of the seven stars and the solar year, 

Of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain. 

Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakespeare's strain. 

Yes, you who sit before me, may think the same 
thoughts that Plato thought; may thrill with the same 
emotion which Shakespeare felt when he wrote his 
marvellous dramas. Moreover, this intellectual power 
is something permanent. We cannot carry our stocks 
and bonds, our houses and land, with us into the other 
world; into the eternity which lies ahead of us, but 
the mental capacity which we develop is something 
which will go with us wherever we go : it is a fund of 
which we can never be made bankrupt. There are just 
three words in the epitaph of the historian Green, who 

[144] 



THE LIFE WORTH WHILE 

wrote the best popular history of England ever pro- 
duced, but they are three words worth remembering: 
**He died learning.'* Whatever may be our lot in the 
next world, I do not believe that it will be to stand 
still. We shall need all of the capital we can take along 
from this existence, and next to the character which 
we develop will come the intellectual capacity and grasp 
which we make our own. 

IV. The Esthetic Ideal. 

A man, however, is not entirely Will, nor is he 
entirely Will plus Intellect; he is also a creature of 
Emotions and Feelings ; in other words, he is esthetic 
as well as ethical and intellectual. No worthy ideal 
of life can afford to neglect this latest, and in a certain 
sense, most brilliant side of personality. To enumerate 
what the individual misses who fails to develop the 
artistic side of his nature would be to enumerate a 
long and important list of items. Take, for instance, 
the case of music; what an inspiration it is, even to 
those who know but little about it ; what an intoxication 
of the spirit; what a heavenly fire! It is said that 
there will be golden harpstrings in heaven, and we 
are wont to look upon it as a place where all of the 
scattered rays of earthly musical talent will be united 
in one harmonious unison, but what will all this amount 
to if one has no appreciation of the sound of a harp- 
string ? 

Much the same thing is true of the allied fields of 
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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

poetry, of painting and of sculpture. Our esthetic en- 
joyment depends, almost entirely, upon cultivation. 
Almost every human being has the germ of artistic 
appreciation within him if he will develop it. If he 
fails, to give it attention, it will die still-born, and he 
will become an esthetic bankrupt for time and, so far as 
we can see, for eternity. Moreoyer, the artistic facul- 
ties must be trained in youth ; money cannot repair the 
damage after the season has passed in which they 
should have been cultivated. "A man," said Doctor 
Patton, upon one occasion, "may have the fortime of 
the money-kings of the universe; he may live one- 
fourth of the year in town, and one-fourth in the coun- 
try, and another fourth at the seashore, and he may 
spend the remainder of his time in Europe, but there 
are some things which his money cannot buy. One 
of them is a delicate appreciation of artistic beauty. 
If he has not nourished the germ which God gave to 
him in his youth, in his old age he will find it withered 
and dead, and when he enters eternity, he will enter 
it bankrupt upon the side of esthetic appreciation. 

The life worth while will be achieved when we view 
things, as Spinoza said, "under the form of eternity," 
instead of under "the form of time," and also when in 
the light of this higher viewpoint we learn to develop 
every side of our nature in a free, harmonious, and 
symmetrical way. This is the highest goal which any 
human being can place before himself as the essential 
business of life. It is, indeed, the "summum bonum" 
of human endeavour. 

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THE LIFE WORTH WHILE 

V. Practical Conclusions. 

There is nothing, I suppose, which causes the careful 
thinker who really believes in the immortality of the 
soul, so much wonder as the manner in which men 
and women habitually neglect the opportunities which 
this world presents for self -development, along worthy 
lines. To make a living ; to become famous or wealthy ; 
even to outshine our neighbors in society: all these 
are objects of much seeking, but to make something 
out of ourselves that is worth lasting forever, — this 
is apparently the last thing most of us think about. 
The majority of old people see the truth when it is too 
late for them to do much to repair the mistakes that 
have been made. The best and greatest of the old men 
that I have known have made this confession, often 
with infinite pathos and regret. I do not suppose that 
any man ever had less to regret in this direction than 
Theodore Cuyler of New York, to whom I referred a 
few moments ago. And yet, I remember hearing Doc- 
tor Cuyler say, after he had reached the age of eighty 
years, when he was asked if he were afraid of any 
spectres in heaven : "yes, I am afraid of the spectres of 
lost opportunities !" 

*T do not wonder," says Ruskin, in the famous lines 
which Drummond has seized and made immortal, "at 
what men suffer, but I wonder often at what they lose." 
Life looks long to a young man and it doesn't seem to 
him to make such difference what he does day after 
day, and hour after hour, but by and by he gets a vision 
of the whole thing in a clearer light, and then he sees 
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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

that every day and every hour were of infinite im- 
portance and that every momentary thought helped to 
make him the man that he finds himself to be. "You 
shall give an account of every idle word in the day 
of judgment," said the Greatest of Teachers, and no 
truer words were ever uttered. Yes, every idle word 
enters, infinitesimally though it be, into the grand 
total which makes you, and you must account for your- 
self at the last. The law of development is inexorable. 
The personality of a man is not built up in a day. Peo- 
ple often think that they can do things which will leave 
no impression upon their souls. There can be no 
greater fallacy than such a conception. When you 
enter the next world, you must enter it as yourself; 
you cannot enter it as anyone else, to think of doing so, 
would be only to think of your own annihilation. 
Therefore, the all-important question ; the question that, 
if I had the power, I would burn as with some corrosive 
acid into the mind and heart of every person in this 
room, is this : "what kind of a self have I ? Is it worth 
lasting forever? if it is not, why isn't it?" What sort 
of a heaven would 'you feel at home in? It is said that 
a dog's heaven is a door-mat before the fire, and some 
men have not much higher ideal before their minds. 
Life, it has been said, is like a fast express train, 
running between two points, which we designate as 
Birth and Death. As the train sweeps along, some of 
us look out the windows; some of us read; some of 
us do nothing; some of us even pick our neighbours' 
pockets : but by and by, there comes a slowing-up of 
the brakes ; the gong sounds ; the trip is over, and the 
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THE LIFE WORTH WHILE 

train whirls off with other passengers. Whatever 
we have done, has been done; whatever we have 
left undone, must always remain so. 

I have only one word more. The life worth while 
cannot be achieved without the firmest confidence in an 
all-wise, an all-powerful and an all-good Captain of our 
souls. We need not quarrel over points in theology, 
but unless we believe in a God, from whom we can 
hide nothing, and to whom we must all render account, 
all our character building will be weak and all of our 
symmetrical development will be slow. 

There is a tomb in St. Paul's Cathedral in London 
which has no body within it because the body has never 
been found. One day, two little boys entered the cathe- 
dral, evidently from the lower strata of London society. 
The one led the other, who, it was easy to see, was 
blind. They passed by the statues of kings, and sages, 
and poets, and every now and then the one boy would 
stop and say to the other "is this the one?" and his little 
comrade would step up and feel the monument with 
his hands and say, **no," until at last they reached the 
monument under which there was no body, and then 
they both stopped and the little boy went over it 
carefully with his fingers, seeing with the eyes of the 
blind, and then the two went out in silence. The 
monument was that of General Charles George Gordon, 
Chinese Gordon, they used to call him, who was killed 
at Khartoum, in the Soudan, and whose body was 
never recovered. Gordon took for his motto, early in 
life, the words which every young man or woman in 
this graduating class would do well to enshrine in 
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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

memory : "never tell anybody to do anything that you 
are afraid to do yourself." It is the inscription upon 
the tomb in St. Paul's, however, to which I wish to 
call special attention because it tells the story, not only 
of the secret of the success of Gordon's life, but of 
every other life that has been truly worth while. These 
are the words of the epitaph: "He gave his strength 
to the weak ; he gave his sympathy to the suffering ; he 
gave his substance to the poor, for he had given his 
heart to his God." 

Without God no life truly worth while can be lived; 
with him such a life may easily become a glorious 
reality. It is only in the full consciousness of such 
an achievement that we can look out toward the future 
and say with Alfred Tennyson: 

Sunset and evening star, 

And one clear call for me ! 

And may there be no moaning of the bar, 

When I put out to sea. 

But such a tide as moving seems asleep. 

Too full for sound and foam, 

When that which drew from out the boundless deep 

Turns again home. 

Twilight and evening bell, 

And after that, the dark! 

And may there be no sadness of farewell, 

When I embark; 

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place 

The flood may bear me far; 

I hope to see my Pilot face to face 

When I have crost the Bar. 



[150] 



XIII 

THE EVOLUTION OF NATIONAL IDEALS 

{Independence Day Sermon) 

TEXT: Psalms y2:y. "In his days shall the righteous 
flourish; and abundance of peace so long as the moon 
endureth." 

THE story of the beginning of governments is a 
very interesting one. In the earlier history of 
the world men lived in separate families with the 
father of the family as the sole law-giver. The code 
of laws was, of course, oral and dependent upon the 
will of the patriarch. As the family developed into 
the clan, and the clan into the tribe, and the tribe into 
the kingdom or the state, little by little the founda- 
tions of written law were laid. At first, these laws 
were very crude, because the people for whom they 
were made were no less crude, and law is always in- 
tended for the people, never the people for the law. 
Law is, in fact, nothing more than crystallised public 
sentiment, and never can be anything more. The 
conflict over laws arises because public sentiment is 
always in a state of ferment, and in every case the old 
teaching holds over by virtue of its position until the 
new can clearly establish its place. A people's laws 
are not, and cannot be any better than the general 

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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

sentiment of the nation. I remember hearing Wood- 
row Wilson say in his Jurisprudence class at Prince- 
ton that the Czar was the best governor for Russia 
until Russia itself put him away. Of course, he said, 
that there were doubtless at that time millions of people 
in Russia who had gotten even then beyond the Czar, 
but there were many more millions who had not reached 
that stage in development. Since the time this re- 
mark was made, Russia has overthrown the Czar, 
public sentiment having reached a stage where the 
monarchist rule no longer represented the voice of the 
people. 

I. The Progress of Evolution — Earlier Stages. 

Law is the servant of the people at large just as 
every individual considered by himself is the servant 
of the law. For this reason, national ideals must be 
evolved and become recognised before they can be 
crystallised into laws. In the early history of the 
world, progress was slow. In the three fundamental 
spheres of personal rights, family rights, and property 
rights, only the simplest rules prevailed. In the sphere 
of personal rights, safety of life and limb was the 
goal of the earlier, as it has been of the later laws of 
nations. The methods, however, by which it was 
guaranteed have changed almost infinitely for the better. 
In the family sphere, while things are still far from 
perfection, much progress has been made. In the 
palmiest days of the Roman Code, a man might put his 
wife to death without any hindrance from the law for 

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THE EVOLUTION OF NATIONAL IDEALS^ 

the most trivial oifences ; for example, if she purloined 
the key to his wine cellar, or if she tasted wine without 
his consent, and for other derelictions of similar char- 
acter. In the terms of the Roman law woman was 
denominated, not a person, but a thing. To-day, she 
has at last achieved equal rights and privileges under 
the law. 

With regard to property rights, laws have multiplied 
and higher ideals prevail. For one thing, human 
slavery, which in early history was universal, has dis- 
appeared almost entirely from the face of the globe. 
Another improvement has been in the enactment of 
laws prohibiting cruelty to domestic animals; still an- 
other, the destruction of property rights, when they 
become a nuisance to the community at large. In 
Shakespeare's day, only four centuries ago, every citi- 
zen, if he cared to do it, could keep a garbage heap 
before his front door and no man could say him nay. 
This too, even though the neighbour's family took the 
fever and died as a result of unsanitary conditions. In 
these earlier days the common sense of the community 
took no note of the most ordinary axioms of general 
welfare. 

II. Further Stages of Evolution. 

The progress of national and social ideals is ad- 
mirably shown by going through some of the castles 
and prisons of the older time. In London, you will 
find rusted models of the rack which a few centuries 
ago was ordinarily and pretty universally used to pull 

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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

people's bodies apart until they told anything to get 
rid of the pain. In European prisons you will find 
worse things in existence than e^en the rack. Now- 
adays, they torture a witness by cross examination but, 
with a few occasional exceptions upon the part of 
ignorant and brutal public officials, in no other way. 
Two or three centuries ago, the rack and other instru- 
ments of torture were in common use all over Europe. 

Another thing which has gone along with the torture 
is the custom of arbitrary imprisonment. Before the 
days of Habeas Corpus a man could be arrested at 
any time, kept in jail any length of time, and given 
no chance to establish his innocence. In the days of 
the French kings, Louis XIV and XV, only a little 
over a century ago, the king signed blank forms of 
arrest, and a favourite of the king filled them in. The 
imhappy wretch whose name went in the blank was 
arrested some dark night, hustled off without a chance 
to say good by to his family, and buried alive in the 
Bastile or some other dungeon of the king. The French 
Revolution made that sort of thing impossible forever. 

Still another evil which is disappearing rapidly, 
but which has not yet quite disappeared, is the union 
of Church and State, or the enforcing of religious 
views by the secular arm. No provision of the United 
States Constitution has met with the general approval 
of our people more than its doctrine of the separation 
of Church and State. It is everywhere recognised that 
religion is, and of right must be, purely a matter of 
conscience, and that the arm of the civil law has as 

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THE EVOLUTION OF NATIONAL IDEALS 

little to do with a question of conscience as a gadfly- 
has to do with the higher mathematics. 



III. Our Responsibility for Future Progress. 

It is not so much the history of the past, however, 
which should concern us to-day, as it is the problems of 
the future. It is true that we should be grateful for 
what has been accomplished, but our duty does not end 
in effervescent gratitude. Upon our shoulders lies the 
burden of to-day and the responsibility for to-morrow. 
Much remains to be done, and in the few minutes which 
are allotted for this sermon I can hope to do no more 
than to mention briefly a few of the more important 
ideals which are in the most immediate need of realisa- 
tion. 

One of the first which should be mentioned is the 
ideal of humaneness, if I may put it in that way. This 
refers to a number of excrescences which still burden 
the body politic and help to encourage pessimism 
among decent people. One side is the child labour 
question which has been so largely discussed in recent 
social reform literature, and to which one of America's 
foremost poets has largely devoted his life. We have 
done a great deal to elevate the living conditions of 
the ordinary labouring man and woman. Much re- 
mains still to be done before every human being is given 
a fair chance to make the most of his life. 

Another consideration which demands attention is 
the problem of prison reform, and the treatment of 
criminality in general. One phase of this question 

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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

relates to the mediaeval character of our legal execu- 
tions in many presumedly civilised commonwealths. 
The matter of capital punishment itself may be left out 
of discussion, but the barbarity of method is beyond 
apology. The time will come, and before very long 
too, when the gallows will be exhibited along with the 
rack and the guillotine and the garrote as specimens of 
days of forgotten barbarism. A little over a hundred 
years ago, capital punishment was inflicted in England 
for over a hundred offences. That is, the law said it 
should be so inflicted. If a man stole sheep, he was to 
be hanged; if he broke into a house to pilfer, he was to 
be hanged; if he stole over five pounds (twenty-five 
dollars in our money), he was to be hanged; if he 
resisted arrest, he was to be hanged; if he defaced 
Westminster bridge, he was to be hanged. Of course, 
the consequence of all this was that eventually no 
jury could be found to return a man guilty of these 
crimes. If a man stole ten pounds, or twenty pounds, 
or fifty pounds, the jury would find that the amount 
did not exceed four pounds and nineteen shillings in 
order to save his neck. And so, by and by the Dra- 
conian laws slid off the statute books. To-day in cer- 
tain sections of America popular sentiment has gotten 
so strong against capital punishment that it is a com- 
mon thing at a murder trial for scores of presumptive 
jurors to be disqualified because they do not beHeve 
in the infliction of the death penalty for any cause. 
In my own home county, in one of the eastern states, 
it is extremely difficult to secure a conviction of murder 
in the first degree. In the case of the only capital 

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THE EVOLUTION OF NATIONAL IDEALS 

sentence which was imposed in that county for years 
the condemned man was not hanged because of the 
pressure brought to bear upon the governor for a com- 
mutation of the sentence from the very section where 
the crime had taken place. Perhaps as a people we have 
not yet evolved to the point where we are willing to 
rid the land of the barbarity of legal executions, but 
it seems to me that we ought to be rapidly approaching 
it. Beyond any question the recent war has turned the 
clock backward in this particular respect, as well as 
in countless others. Nevertheless, we ought to recog- 
nise the fact that the disappearance of cruelty in any 
form is, and always has been, the distinguishing mark 
of the upward progress of civilisation. 

In this connection, attention should be called to the 
increase of lawlessness throughout our country as a 
whole. The mob spirit has shown itself with renewed 
emphasis since the recrudescence of animal passions in 
the world war. The barbarity of many of these ex- 
hibitions of mob violence cannot be duplicated outside 
of the records of the Inquisition or of Middle Age 
criminal procedure on the continent. It is time for 
Christian people throughout our land to awaken to the 
necessity of maintaining law by peaceful procedure in 
order that we may wipe out the terrible stain which 
the mob spirit is fast placing upon our history. 

IV. The Most Important Future Ideal. 

Perhaps the most important ideal of all, and the one 
which is receiving most consideration nowadays is the 

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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

ideal of world wide peace. It is possible that we are 
not yet quite civilised enough for universal peace, 
but it is to be hoped that we are heading rapidly in the 
direction of it. Just what the practical result of the 
recent disarmament conference will be we cannot 
say, but the mere fact that such conferences are being 
called is an item of no little importance. The infinite 
folly of war, the stupidity of settling disputes by brute 
force instead of by the common reason of mankind, 
will some day become apparent to everybody and then 
the torpedo boats, and the armored cruisers, and the 
battleships will go to the museums, and the war budget, 
which now swallows over ninety per cent of our funds, 
will be spent building libraries and colleges and parks 
and public roads and art galleries and in providing 
comforts for people instead of providing approved 
methods of killing them. The day when the swords 
will be beaten into plowshares and the spears into 
pruning hooks is sure to come, and it may be nearer 
than most of us think. 

V. The Moralising of National Ideals. 

One of the hopeful signs of the future, in which 
we are all especially interested at this time is the with- 
drawal of government protection from immoral agen- 
cies. That the nation should become a silent partner 
in the perpetuation of vice and vicious habits, thereby 
lending aid to agencies which have for their aim its 
own destruction, is a form of suicide as peculiar as it is 
indefensible. Of course, the drawback hitherto has 

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THE EVOLUTION OF NATIONAL IDEALS 

been the toleration or indifference of public sentiment 
It is gratifying to say, however, that things are pro- 
gressing toward a higher level. Lottery schemes have 
been put under the ban of the law, and gambling, which 
has been a function of government many times during 
the past, no longer has the support or approval of the 
state. It is an exceedingly disgraceful thing, that vice 
is still harboured in certain sections under the protec- 
tion of the law, and that, on the ground of expediency, 
it has found defenders among the ranks of professedly 
decent people. It is only a question of time when this 
attitude must, and will change. Of the three chief foes 
of social progress, gambling, social vice, and the saloon, 
the first and the last, after making the most strenuous 
fight for legal tolerance, have at last been put under 
the ban. The saloon was fought energetically in city 
precinct after city precinct, in crossroads town after 
crossroads town, in county after county, state after 
state, until the national sentiment became crystallised 
to the point where it was outlawed by the voice of 
government itself. 

VI. Concliiding Corollaries^ 

The advocates of this or the other reform some- 
times forget the necessity for the slow and gradual, 
but none the less sure and powerful development of 
public sentiment, in order that permanent progress 
may be made. The prophet has such clear perception 
of future needs that he is apt to become impatient 
because things move so slowly* But things must move 
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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

slowly at first, and after all they move more rapidly 
than many of us imagine. The function of the true 
reformer is to blaze the way; to keep hammering at 
the problem ; to beat down prejudice ; to endure calum- 
nies; to suffer persecution, detraction, and misunder- 
standing, but at last to win the goal. The public at 
large is a great unwieldy sort of animal which has to be 
coaxed at times, and goaded at times into what is 
necessary for its health; perchance, even for its salva- 
tion. But when the unwieldy animal is once fairly set 
in motion the reform soon comes. This too, is pre- 
eminently the mission of the pulpit. It is the chief 
business of the preacher to develop national ideals as 
well as to emphasise the individual welfare of his 
auditors. To keep men's eyes fixed on the true goal of 
individual and social life; on something higher still to 
be realised; to fight the agencies which are pulling in 
the downward direction ; assuredly the pulpit can have 
no greater mission than this. Moreover, this is the 
special reason for the existence of memorial occasions, 
like Independence Day, when in the light of past sacri- 
fices, we rededicate ourselves and our nation to the 
task which lies ahead. 

The life of a man and the life of a nation can rise 
no higher than the goal which is placed before them. 
Against this goal there is always the constant pressure 
downward, the desire to stand still, which always 
means to go backward, so that progress is only achieved 
by constant effort and struggle. "Look thou not down 
but up," is the watchword of success in the moral, 
social, and the national reahn. He only is a true citizen 

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THE EVOLUTION OF NATIONAL IDEALS 

who strives, day by day, to develop higher national 
ideals, and by adding his own mite of effort to the cause 
of righteousness brings the gates of the Golden City 
a little closer to our view. 

"Be what thou seemest, live thy creed, 
Hold up to earth the torch divine, 
Be what thou prayest to be made, 
Let the Great Master's steps be thine. 

"Fill up each hour with what will last. 
Buy up the moments as they go, 
The life above, when this is past 
Is the ripe fruit of life below." 



tieij 



XIV 

THE MODERN WORSHIP OF MONEY 

{Labor Day Sermon) 

TEXT: Ex. 32:8. "They have made them a molten calf, 
and have worshipped it." 

IDOLATRY is not the heritage of a single race or a 
particular period. It is the crime of the civilised 
man and of the savage, of the bondman and the free- 
man, of the inhabitant of the jungle, and of the 
fashionable patroller of Rotten Row, or of Fifth 
Avenue. Of course, the names and the appearance of 
the deities have changed. We no longer worship 
Ashtoreth with the obscene ceremonies which excited 
the horror of Isaiah or Jeremiah; we no longer rear 
huge statues of brass to Moloch and bum our children 
alive in their hideous arms while the beating of count- 
less drums drowns the cries of the hapless innocents, 
as they did in the days of Ahab and Manasseh ; we no 
longer construct a literal calf of gold, as did the chil- 
dren of Israel in the desert, but if anybody imagines 
that the spirit of idolatry, the spirit of Ashtoreth 
worship, or Moloch worship, or the worship of the 
Golden Calf is dead, he is very much mistaken. Ashto- 
reth is worshipped nightly in London and in New 
York, and all over the civilised world with rites which 

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THE MODERN WORSHIP OF MONEY 

would have put heathendom to shame ; her shrines arc 
erected, not only among the poor and vicious, but in. 
the palaces of the rich and the society leaders of the- 
metropolis. We do not burn our children alive in the 
arms of a brazen deity nowadays, but if you will ask 
a reputable surgeon of any of our larger hospitals, he 
would tell you more children's lives are sacrificed every 
year to unnecessary and false social requirements than 
were burned in all the ages, in the literal worship of 
Moloch. 

I. The Golden Calf i% Our Modern Age. 

We laugh at the idea of worshipping an image such 
as Aaron made for the half civilised Israelites, but the 
smile has not disappeared from our faces before we get 
down on our knees and prostrate ourselves before 
the invisible calf of money that rules pretty nearly 
everything in civilisation to-day. How careful we are 
not to insult him; how elastic our opinions become ^ 
how reversible, if need be, our political views; how 
made-to-fit-the-occasion our religious attitudes. It is 
terribly hard to convince a man that anything is a sin 
if he is making a lot of money out of it. There is 
"Sin" written all over the centre of the work he is 
doing, but his spectacles have a blind spot in the middle 
so that he cannot read the word; moreover, if anybody 
else reads it for him, he gets angry and says it isn't 
there. 

There are a great many evils which afflict humanity^ 
to-day, but the evil which reaches the farthest and hurts. 

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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

the worst, is the evil which the Apostle Paul said was 
a root of every kind of crime in his day: the love of 
money. The love of money perpetuates the reign of 
intemperance and vice ; protects and apologises for bri- 
bery and crime ; oppresses the poor ; is the prime factor 
in perpetuating militarism and war ; produces all forms 
of civic corruption, and ruins the empire of the home. 
More than this, it enters the church and poisons its 
efforts to raise humanity to a higher level. There are 
ministers, no less than laymen, who worship the Golden 
Calf rather than the Living God, and whose prayers 
are too heavily freighted with gold to ever rise above 
their lips. 

Let us notice very briefly how this universal Mam- 
mon worship has affected the life of the American 
people. In the first place, it has created a false ideal 
for the young. If you go through our greater Ameri- 
can colleges to-day, you will find that the chief ambition 
of the great majority of the boys studying therein is to 
get rich, and not only to get rich, but to get very rich. 
There are more pictures of John D. Rockefeller and 
Andrew Carnegie hanging in the rooms of college 
students to-day, than there are of Benjamin Franklin 
or Thomas Jefferson. Their ideal is a money ideal. 
Moreover, that money ideal is not always linked up with 
the highest conception of honesty in its attainment. 
Some one has expressed the motto of the age in this 
fashion. "Money is the principal thing, therefore get 
money. Get it honestly if you can, but by all means 
get it." 

Then again the modern worship of money is pri- 
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THE MODERN WORSHIP OF MONEY 

marily responsible for bad government and for the 
dishonest management of great offices of public trust. 
That was a sad spectacle which was enacted some years 
ago when a United States Senator over three score and 
ten years of age, who had served his state and.people 
for over twenty years, was sentenced to imprisonment 
in his old age because of dishonesty, due to his love 
of money. The extent to which lobbying and bribery 
are carried on in both state and national legislation 
is a matter of open and public scandal. Bribery is a 
sin as old as Philip, the father of Alexander the Great, 
who said he could always capture a city after he had 
introduced therein a mule with a sack of gold on its 
back^ Sir Robert Walpole, of England, was responsi- 
ble for the maxim : "Every man has his price." Francis 
Bacon, the founder of modern science, stands pilloried 
before the ages because he accepted bribes, by his own 
confession, to the amount of forty thousand pounds. 
Bribery, therefore, is nothing new, and yet, I have 
been assured by those who are in a position to know, 
that if the public generally were aware of the legisla- 
tion in America that has been passed and kept from 
passing by lobby influences during the last half century, 
they would open their eyes in astonishment. 

II. Golden Calf in Bminess, 

This pernicious state of affairs in national life, finds 

its apt counterpart in great business and industrial 

concerns which affect a large number of people and 

which are frequently controlled by a few. There are 

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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

those present who will recall the great life insurance 
scandal of some years ago, which laid the foundation 
of the political fortunes of Charles E. Hughes. It 
will be recalled that Mr. Hughes brought out the fact 
that in some of these companies salaries were ostensibly 
paid to dead people (just who really got them does not 
yet appear to be clear) ; salaries were paid to people 
for no service rendered whatever; contributions of 
money collected from policy-holders of all political 
parties were paid to the campaign fund of one party; 
outrageous and unwarranted expenditures were made 
for office furniture and the like. The worst thing 
about it all was that this money so recklessly squan- 
dered came from the hard earned savings of thousands 
•of policy-holders all over the world, who were paying 
large premiums, often denying themselves the necessi- 
ties of life that they might save their policies from 
lapsing and in this way protect their families. This 
insurance investigation, revealing as it did, the insa- 
tiable greed for money on the part of leading business 
men is to my mind one of the most disgraceful pages 
in the history of the social life of America. Life in- 
surance is one of the great blessings which have re- 
sulted from the progress of science, but its honest 
management is imperative. The highway robber of 
ancient times who held up passengers and relieved them 
of their purses rarely took any money from a poor 
person, or from one who had but little; nowadays, 
liowever, the love of money appears to find its chief 
scope in the robbery of the poor. It will be recalled 
that the strongest language used by the Christ during 

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THE MODERN WORSHIP OF MONEY 

his ministry was applied to those hypocrites who de- 
voured widow's houses and within were full of extor- 
tion and excess. It was to this class that he applied the 
famous anathema of Matthew 24: "Ye serpents, ye 
generation of vipers, how can ye .escape the damnation 
of hell.'* 



III. The Golden Cdf cmd the Home, 

A third instance of the injurious effect of the 
modern worship of money is found in its influence 
upon the home. I shall not presume to go into detail 
concerning this phase of the question. It is my own 
judgment, however, that greed has broken up more 
homes, shattered more domestic bliss, and caused more 
dissension in families than any other one factor in 
the world. This has occurred, for the most part, in 
two ways; first, by extortion and oppression from 
without, which includes all unjust exactions of capital 
in any form, or of the oppression of one man by an- 
other; and, second, by the love of money in the heart 
of those who make up the family themselves, making 
them perpetually dissatisfied with their lot and station 
in life, and ever longing for more. The thirst for 
money is the most relentless passion known to the 
human soul. It will doom millions of human beings to 
famine and torture; it will sacrifice virtue, morality 
and religion; it will plunge nations into the inferno 
of war; it will wring its dirty coin out of the heart's 
blood of widows and orphans; it will ally itself with 
intemperance, vice and crime; in short, there is noth- 
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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

ing in the whole category of diabolism which it will 
not encompass in order to secure its ends. The evil 
influence of this worship of the Golden Calf upon the 
homes of America is one of the strongest indictments 
which future ages will bring against the inherent 
selfishness of modern industrialism. 

IV. The Golden Calf and the Church, 

Worst of all, if there be a worst in the catalogue, 
is the influence which the worship of money has had 
upon the church. The epistle of James is largely 
directed against the difficulties which had already arisen 
in .the church because of the inordinate love of money 
on the part of certain of its members. *'Go to, now, 
ye rich people, weep and howl for your miseries shall 
come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your 
garments are motheaten. Your gold and silver is 
cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness 
against you, and shall eat your flesh as if it were fire." 
The Apostle Paul, in his letters to Timothy, repeatedly 
referred to the danger of worshipping money instead 
of giving wholehearted devotion to the service of the 
Lord. "Those who are eager to be rich," he says, 
"get tempted and trapped in many senseless and per- 
nicious propensities that drag men down to ruin and 
destruction. For love of money is the root of all 
mischief ; it is by aspiring to be rich that certain indi- 
viduals have gone astray from the faith and found 
themselves pierced with many a pang of remorse." 
It is one of the crowning glories of the religion of 
Jesus Christ that it overthrows all artificial social 

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THE MODERN WORSHIP OF MONEY 

barriers and barriers of caste. Before God, we are 
all equal ; the rich have no higher distinction than the 
poor, and so it i| in every church which is seeking to 
embody and to proclaim the ideals of Christ. Too 
often to-day, however, the church, like the world, bows 
before Mammon; is afraid to speak the truth for fear 
it will offend the unrighteous power of wealth, and 
forgets that it is certain to lose the power of God just 
in proportion as it sells itself to God's greatest enemy. 
One of the most striking scandals in the universal 
Christian world is the lack of harmony and co-opera- 
tion manifested by the followers of the Christ. In the 
Intercessory Prayer given just before the arrest and 
crucifixion of Jesus, he prayed that all of his future 
disciples should be one in the same sense that he and 
the Father are one. That prayer has not yet been 
answered. One of the grandest steps ever taken in the 
direction of answering it was the organisation of the 
Young People's Society of Christian Endeavour. In- 
terdenominational in its scope, it would seem that it 
should have secured the favour of all denominations. 
But after a while there were various secessions from 
it, and its influence in the field of unity was largely 
curtailed and destroyed. The New York Independent, 
in commenting on the situation, remarked editorially 
that what stood in the way of the universal acceptance 
of the Christian Endeavour programme was ''the inter- 
ests of publishing societies," and the editor, who at the 
time this was written was Doctor William Hayes 
Ward, added further that the ultimate cause was "the 
love of money, the source of most evils." 
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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

Surely, there is no place in the world where the love 
of money is seen in quite so hideous a form as when 
it soils the white robes of the church. I can under- 
stand, in a measure, how politicians, accustomed to 
seeing and handling what is worst in social life, can 
be brought to sell their souls for money ; I can under- 
stand how a bar-keeper, or a gambler, reared amid 
vicious surroundings and feeling shut off as by a ban 
from better society can do the same thing, but how 
any one professing to handle the oracles of God and to 
speak in the name of Jesus Christ can do this is beyond 
my imagination. 

V. The Golden Calf and Labour, 

We ordinarily think of the worship of money as 
being the exclusive characteristic of the rich man, or 
of the capitalist. As a matter of fact, however, there 
are many people with but little money who worship 
Mammon at heart quite as much as those who have 
more. The man who wills to be rich is, from the moral 
point of view, in the same class as the man who actually 
possesses the wealth which the other man would like to 
possess. The curse of our modern industrial order is 
selfishness, the worship of the Golden Calf on the part 
of both rich and poor. Until we can rid ourselves of 
this disease of the soul there will be no peace in the 
body politic. We must cease our idolatry, learn to 
think in unselfish, instead of in selfish terms, and in 
this way help to bring in the Kingdom of God. 

It should doubtless be added, as a corrective corollary 
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THE MODERN WORSHIP OF MONEY 

that because the worship of money is the great sin of 
our modern age is no reason why we should abandon 
the use of money itself as a medium of exchange. 
Money in itself is neither good nor evil. People were 
covetous before money existed, and if it should ever 
be abolished, they will doubtless remain covetous. It 
is the spirit of selfish competition, the animal lust for 
selfish gain, the jungle attitude toward our neighbours 
which is responsible for the situation. We must un- 
dergo a change of heart, we must come to see that our 
interest in the good of humanity as a whole must count 
for more with us than heaping up gold for ourselves. 
We must, in short, learn to worship Christ instead of 
worshipping Gold if we are to save ourselves and the 
world from the perils which surround us. 

After all, when we come to think about it, there is 
much, in fact all that is eternally worth while, that 
money cannot buy. It cannot buy peace of mind or 
of conscience, as a great many bad people have found 
out; it cannot buy artistic appreciation or any of the 
finer touches of the intellect: these things come only 
with patient labour and effort. It cannot buy reconcilia- 
tion with God, or the pardon for sin, for only a broken 
and contrite heart can purchase these. But though it 
cannot buy any of these things, yet all of them may be 
sold for it; and because they are daily being sold and 
because men are daily going down to ruin on account 
of this fact, I plead for a different spirit in the hearts 
of those who listen to these final words. I impeach the 
Mammon of modern civilisation, in the name of the 
young men and women in whose hearts it is implanting 

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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

false ideals of life, ideals which will mean disgrace and 
ruin at the last for them and their homes; I impeach 
it in the name of our own fair land whose strength it 
seeks to sap in the halls of popular government; I im- 
peach it in the name of the homes of America which it 
has entered too often to blight and to destroy; last of 
all, before high Heaven, I impeach it in the name of 
the Church of the Christ himself, the Christ whose 
last prayer it has sought to render of no avail and 
whose sacrifice on the Cross it has belittled and 
scorned ! 



[172] 



THE DEATH OF THE GODS 

(An Address for Armistice Day) 

AT the conclusion of Part I of his book entitled 
"Thus Spake Zarathustra," Friedrich Nietzsche, 
who claimed to be the Anti-Christ and who must as- 
sume no slight responsibility for the horrors of the 
Great War, gave expression to the following senti- 
ment : "Dead are all the gods ; now do we desire the 
Superman to live.'' 

Not in the way that the half -mad philosopher in- 
tended them, and yet in a very true and real way, his 
words are already approaching realisation. The most 
significant thing which has been going on in the world 
during the last six years has not been the slaughter of 
men, nor the destruction of property — it has been the 
smashing of ideals. And inasmuch as the only practi- 
cal definition of the Deity which is conceivable must 
always be expressed in terms of an ideal, the process 
may very fairly be entitled — "The Death of the Gods." 
A man's God is always his highest ideal, and, con- 
versely, his highest ideal is always his God. And now, 
as never before, the old ideals of the past, in govern- 
ment, in politics, in religion, and in education are going 
to smash — dynamited by the "Busy Berthas"; shot 

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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

through by the shrieking shrapnel; buried past resur- 
rection beneath the abysmal mud and squalour of the 
trenches. Of a truth, the old gods of the past, or at 
least most of them, are dead. 

The slaughter of the gods is nothing new in the 
history of humanity. In the early days of savagery, 
every nation had its god. This god was regarded as 
a sort of extra defence in war and in times of great 
peril to the tribe or to the nation. About one-half of 
the cuneiform inscriptions of the ancient Babylonians 
and Assyrians are devoted to statements like these, 
which I have copied verbatim from George Rawlin- 
son's translation of the inscription of Tiglath Pileser I, 
an Assyrian king who ruled about 1150 B.C. : 

"In the service of my lord Asshur, my chariots and 
warriors I assembled. I set out on my march. The 
exceeding fear of the power of Asshur, my lord, over- 
whelmed them. ... At this time, in exalted reverence 
to Asshur, my lord, . . . there being found no equal 
to me in war and no second in battle, to the countries 
of the powerful kings who dwelt upon the upper 
ocean . . . the lord Asshur having urged me, I went." 
And so on the record reads interminably. 

Now if we substitute the German word "Gott" for 
Asshur in this record, written over a thousand years 
before Christ, it sounds for all the world like a mod- 
em Prussian war bulletin. 

The ultimate test of all these gods was, of course, 
pragmatic. If the nation had bad luck in war the 
chances were that it tried a new deity. The principle 
was something like that of the little boy who announced 

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THE DEATH OF THE GODS 

to his mother, one evening, that he was not going to 
say his prayers any more. When she inquired the 
reason for this decision, the youthful philosopher re- 
plied — ''Well, I didn't say them last night and nothing 
happened, and I am not going to say them to-night and 
if nothing happens again, after this I am not going 
to say them at all." 

Of course, the idea of the Deity, in the cases to 
which we have been referring, was fundamentally one 
of superstition or magic. As men advanced in the 
scale of civilisation, they gradually substituted moral 
concepts or ideals for the cruder notions of their 
earlier years. They pinned their faith upon, and 
guided their lives by, certain great principles of 
thought and action. Now when these principles go 
to the scrap-heap they are inevitably discarded, in the 
same way that our savage forebears gave up the wor- 
ship of Asshur or Nisroch, when Asshur or Nisroch 
no longer "made good" in the fields which they occu- 
pied. 

I want to talk about four of these principles or ideals 
in the realm of modern civilisation which I believe the 
world upheaval is fast sending to the scrap-heap. I 
shall designate these four gods of the past, for the sake 
of clearness and brevity, by the following titles: 
Scientific Materialism, Aristocratic Privilege, Religious 
Formalism, and Narrow Nationalism. All four have 
been mighty gods in the cultural circles of the last 
century and all four, I believe, are dead, past recall, as 
a result of the recent world war. As thoughtful men 
and women, it is our business to bury them and to 
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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

reconstruct our social and educational systems without 
them. They are dead, anyway, as Lazarus was before 
his resurrection and, if we mistake not, the signs of 
putrefaction have already set in. It is time to roll 
the boulder against the door of the sepulchre and to 
shut it up forever. 

I. The God of Scientific Materialism. 

The first god to which we have referred — the God of 
Scientific or Rationalistic Materialism — was the great 
god in the educational world of the last century. His 
coat of arms was a chemical retort and a brace of pip- 
kins and the crown of laurel which he offered his 
devotees was a Ph.D. degree from Berlin or Leipsic. 
He proclaimed the new rule of scientific investigation 
as the be-all and end-all of human progress. His fol- 
lowers scoffed at religion, and especially at Chris- 
tianity, as being only a relic of superstition and as 
beneath the consideration of the scholarly mind. They 
boldly prophesied a new era in which science should 
be the only religion and in which humanity should 
march to perfection under the banner of Comte or 
Haeckel. And humanity has marched — to the per- 
fection of gas bombs and machine guns and long dis- 
tant cannon able to kill unoffending civilians at a 
range of seventy miles. This god has sent out men 
from our great universities trained to invent and use 
every device of intellectual ingenuity to maim and tor- 
ture and destroy their fellow creatures. This god has 
let loose the Turks upon the helpless Armenians, and 

[176] 



THE DEATH OF THE GODS 

has then issued university manifestoes to justify the 
fiendish deeds of massacre and wholesale extermination 
which followed. This god has torpedoed little chil- 
dren and women in the supreme agony of woman's 
existence on the Lusitania, has, Paderewski tells us, 
killed practically all the little ones under seven years 
of age in Poland, has filled the lungs of thousands of 
men with chlorine gas on the Western Front and left 
them to choke to death after days of inexpressible tor- 
ture and has let loose every demon of cruelty which 
Satan had hitherto kept under leash in the unseen world 
of diabolism. Of a truth it is time that this god were 
dead and buried, before his worship proves the suicide 
of the human race. 

I do not wish to be misunderstood here. I hold no 
brief against science as science. Science is right and 
proper in its place. What I am objecting to is the 
deification of science — the making a god of it. It is 
the worship of this god which constitutes what the 
greater part of the world has come to know and loathe 
as KULTUR. KuLTUR is only another name for 
the God of Scientific Intellectualism and of Material- 
istic Efficiency over which our modern age has gone 
wild in a riot of frenzied idolatry. 

Henry Churchill King in an address delivered in 
Washington a few years ago, before the close of the 
war, said that when the representatives of the warring 
nations gathered at last around the council table there 
would be a place at the head of the table reserved for 
a figure clad in scarlet. This figure, if asked its name, 
he said, would reply: *T am the Incarnation of De- 

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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

structive Science." It is time to chain this false God 
of Kultur, of Destructive Science, and to hurl him 
down to the bottomless pit where he belongs. It is a 
case of Michael slaying the dragon or the dragon slay- 
ing Michael and our prophecy is that Michael will win. 
Nay, we shall go farther and say that Michael has 
won. German kultur, the God of Materialistic 
Science — or of Scientific Intellectualism — is to-day 
deader than the ghost of the late departed Caesar, 

II. The God of Aristocratic Privilege. 

The second god in the social and educational realm 
which humanity will elect to get along without in the 
days to come, is the God of Aristocratic Privilege. 
This god has ruled the human race since the dawn of 
recorded history. He is the incarnation of the caste 
spirit with all which that term implies. From the very 
beginning, there have been two classes in the world: 
the masters and the slaves. We talk about the democ- 
racy of ancient Greece or Rome, but the truth is that 
there was never any real democracy in either nation. 
Even in cultured Athens, at the height of her civilisa- 
tion, for every freeman in the population there were 
from a half-dozen to a dozen slaves. The situation in 
Rome and in other nations was still worse. The lot 
of a slave in these older times was wretched almost be- 
yond the power of imagination. The inhuman punish- 
ment of crucifixion was devised in the first place as a 
means by which to terrorise the slaves. If a master 
thought he detected signs of insubordination on the 

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THE DEATH OF THE GODS 

part of his servants, it was no unusual thing to have 
one of them crucified in order that his prolonged ago- 
nies might serve as an object lesson to his comrades. 
It was one of the taunts commonly hurled upon the 
early Christians that the God they worshipped had met 
the ignominious fate of a slave. After long years, a 
third class, what the French call the bourgeois or mid- 
dle class, gradually made its appearance between the 
two classes of masters and slaves. In time, also, the 
slave became the proletariat or working man. But 
throughout all these changes, the God of Aristocratic 
Privilege has retained his sceptre. Always there has 
been a privileged class which has thought only of itself 
and has left the rest of humanity "go hang." Always 
this ruling or privileged class has taught the doctrine 
that the weak are to be exploited for the benefit of the 
strong, and that society is rightly made up of two 
constituent elements — the one to be trampled upon and 
the other to do the trampling. Always these selfish 
aristocrats, whether kings or nobles or priests or mili- 
tarists or capitalists or whatever other title they may 
wear, have manifested the most callous indifference for 
the men and women who grind out their lives that their 
lords may have an additional thrill of pleasure. Hear 
George Moore, one of the typical representatives of 
the group in our own day, who possesses the merit of 
saying plainly what the others think but do not often 
say aloud: 

"What care I," he says, "that some millions of 
wretched Israelites died under Pharaoh's lash or 
Egypt's sun? It was well that they died that I might 

[179] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

have the pyramids to look on, or to fill a musing hour 
with wonderment. What care I that the virtue of some 
sixteen-year-old maiden was the price paid for Ingre's 
painting — The Source, that exquisite dream of inno- 
cence, to think of till my soul is sick with delight of 
the painter's holy vision. Nay more, the knowledge 
that a wrong was done, — that millions of Israelites died 
in torments, that a girl or a thousand girls, died in the 
hospital for that one virginal thing, is an added pleas- 
ure which I could not afford to spare." 

And he goes on further to say : 

"That some wretched farmers or miners should 
refuse to starve that I may not be deprived of my demi- 
tasse at Tortonis — is monstrous." 

Doubtless it seemed monstrous to him and to the 
other selfish aristocrats whom he represents that 
"some wretched farmers and miners should refuse to 
starve" in order that he and his companions might loll 
in the lap of luxury, but the point is that since this war 
they are going to refuse. It was in hot indignation 
against this sort of thing that Robert Bums wrote his 
famous lines : 

"You see yon birkie ca'd a lord 
Who struts and stares and a' that, 
Though hundreds cower at his word 
He's but a coof for a' that." 

And yet when Burns wrote those lines he knew that, 
in actual fact, they pictured what ought to be rather 
than what is. He knew that the "birkies" had the bit 
in the mouths of the hundreds who cowered before 
them and that they proposed to keep on strutting and 

[180] 



THE DEATH OF THE GODS 

staring and applying the whip and spur. I hold no brief 
for the Bolsheviki, but I can read, and any intelligent 
man who cares to do it, can read in the language of 
that proletariat revolution in Russia the inevitable 
handwriting on the wall, unless the God of Caste, the 
God of Selfish Class Rule, in short the God of Aristo- 
cratic Privilege is speedily dethroned forever! 

III. The God of Religious Formalism. 

The third god who will have to go in the new dis- 
pensation after the war, is the God of Religious For- 
malism. Here we touch something different from 
anything which has hitherto been mentioned. The 
most shocking thing about the recent collapse of civili- 
sation is the manner in which the principal actors in it 
have appealed to religion in order to justify their 
unholy actions. They have gone to the Bible, and to 
the church and to religion generally in order to justify 
every abominable transaction that has taken place in 
this chamber of horrors. The customary order of 
procedure has been to cut the throats of the Arme- 
nians or some other defenceless people and then thank 
God for helping in the process; to drop a few bombs 
on a church or a group of tenement houses and thank 
God again for the results which followed ; to let loose 
perdition on the battlefield and then go to church and 
sing psalms; to pray and then kill; to read the Bible 
and then go out and invent a new gas bomb; to sit 
down on the field of battle with the stark, blackened, 
upturned faces of thousands of men baking in the sun 

[181] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

and write a telegram saying that "with the help of 
God" we have made an unexampled number of widows 
and orphans. 

In my boyhood days, I used to read Shakespeare's 
"King Richard the Third,'' and reflect upon the man- 
ner in which that historic ogre would use the name of 
the Deity in order to forward his plans of murder and 
assassination. And yet I always realised that Richard 
was, as Shakespeare intended he should be, an arrant 
hypocrite. When, for example, he says : "I would to 
God my heart were flint like Edward's, or Edward's 
soft and pitiful like mine; I am too childish foolish 
for this world," while he is plotting murder and as- 
sassination, I used to laugh at him, because I knew he 
was an unconscionable hypocrite, but when William II 
thanked God, under similar circumstances, I did not 
laugh for there was little reason to doubt his sincerity. 
What was wrong with him was his conception of reli- 
gion. That conception was a part of the old Pagan 
idea that God is a God of hatred, a God of war, a God 
of eternal malignancy and destruction. It is character- 
istic of this idea that it makes the Bible the justification 
of every sort of Pagan and pre-Christian enormity, and 
that it makes the chief use of the church and the clergy 
to secure some sort of spiritual justification for the 
misdeeds and crimes of the king or of the nation. 
William of Prussia was educated in schools where 
this false gospel was taught and, in a sense, he was 
not to be blamed for imbibing the teaching. The same 
kind of religious exegesis which made Robert G. 
Ingersoll an infidel made William II something worse 

[182] 



THE DEATH OF THE GODS 

than an infidel — that is, a religious formalist. It is 
easy for a man to so read and interpret the Bible as 
to become worse than a heathen. The Pharisees and 
Sadducees of the time of Christ were great Bible read- 
ers, in their own way. They were terribly orthodox 
on the letter but just as terribly heterodox on the 
spirit. And the so-called Christian teachers of our 
own day who are "long" on the slaughter of the 
Canaanites and the hewing in pieces of Agag, and 
"short" on the Sermon on the Mount are the Pharisees 
and Sadducees of the modern age. The religious semi- 
nary of the future which purports to be Christian will 
have to make good its pretensions by showing that its 
students go out filled with the spirit of Christ, instead 
of being walking and talking embodiments of a whole 
host of formalistic and pre-Christian conceptions, the 
acceptance of which caused the crucifixion of Christ 
in the first place. 

The God of Religious Formalism is dead, and the 
shrines where he was worshipped, before and during 
the war, will soon be deserted and will become the habi- 
tation of every abominable and unclean thing. It is 
time to shut them up now and overthrow the idol 
whose worship has wrought so much havoc for 
humanity. 

IV. The God of Narrow Nationalism. 

The fourth god who will have to be buried in the 
near future is the God of Narrow Nationalism. This 
is the old tribal god of the centuries. He has taught 

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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

the people of every nation that the people of other 
nations are inferior and of a lower order of creation 
as compared with the people of his own nation. He 
originated such terms as "Gentile" and "Barbarian" 
and all the other egotistical titles in the nationalistic 
category. He writes songs like "Deutschland iiber 
Alles" and he tries to make his followers believe that 
because they are themselves therefore they ought to be 
"iiber" everybody else. The Apostle Paul had this 
god in mind when he said, "I am debtor both to the 
Greeks and to the Barbarians," and again, "In Christ 
Jesus, there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor 
free." Christianity, from the beginning was opposed 
to the whole spirit of narrow nationalism. It always 
considered humanity as a whole, never one particular 
tribe or class or nation. This world would have been 
spared much misery if it had accepted such an ideal. 
Instead of doing this, however, it gradually developed 
a situation of international anarchy which has now 
reached a point where its further continuance will 
mean little short of annihilation for the human species. 
The whole philosophy of Narrow Nationalism is 
based upon an absurdity. The people of all nations 
agree that it is wrong to defraud or rob or murder 
each other, and that, if these things are done, the 
wrongdoer must be punished; but the nations which 
are made up of these same people act on the principle 
that it is right for a group to do as a group what it 
is wrong for any individual of the group to do. This 
is absurd. Thinking people in all nations are now 
coming to see that there must be international law in 

[184] 



THE DEATH OF THE GODS 

the future to restrain the criminal actions of the group, 
just as long ago national law was established within 
the group to restrain the criminality of the individual. 
Mr. Wilson in his first war message to Congress put 
the whole case admirably in these words : 

*'We are at the beginning of an age in which it will 
be insisted that the same standards of conduct and 
responsibiHty for wrong done shall be observed among 
nations and their governments that are observed among 
the individual citizens of civilised states." 

Mr. Asquith, the former premier of Great Britain, 
holds that Narrow Nationalism has completely broken 
down and that the only hope of the world lies in na- 
tional disarmament and in some sort of a world court. 
In an address delivered at Leeds, England, some 
months ago, he said: 

"The limitation of armaments, the acceptance of 
arbitration as the normal and natural solvent of inter- 
national disputes, the relegation of wars of ambition 
and aggression between the States to the same category 
of obsolete follies in which we class the faction fights 
of the old republics, the petty conflicts of feudal lords 
and private duelling — ^these will be milestones which 
mark the stages of the road. We must banish once 
for all from our catalogue of maxims the time-worn 
fallacy that if you wish for peace you must make 
ready for war." 

Nor is Mr. Asquith alone in these sentiments among 
the political leaders of his people. Mr. Lloyd George, 
the present premier of England, said in his address 
before the British Trades Union, as early as 1918: 
[185] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

"The crushing weight of modern armaments, the 
increasing evil of compulsory military service, the vast 
waste of wealth and effort involved in warlike prepara- 
tion — ^these are blots on our civilisation, of which every 
thinking individual must be ashamed. For these and 
other similar reasons we are confident that a great 
attempt must be made to establish some international 
organisation, an alternative to war as a means of set- 
tling international disputes." 

May we sum up the question with a few words from 
a recent article by Mr. H. G. Wells, in an American 
magazine. Mr. Wells says: 

"Existing states have become impossible as abso- 
lutely independent sovereignties. The new conditions 
bring them so close together and give them such ex- 
travagant powers of mutual injury that they must 
either sink national pride and dynastic ambitions in 
subordination to the common welfare of mankind or 
else utterly shatter one another. It becomes more and 
more plainly a choice between the League of free na- 
tions, and famished men looting in search of non- 
existent food amidst the burning ruins of our world. 
In the end I believe that the common sense of mankind 
will prefer a revision of its ideas of nationality and 
imperialism, to the latter alternative. 

V. The New World Order. 

The new day of which the poet-prophet of England 
dreamed nearly a century ago is now dawning. How 

[186] 



THE DEATH OF THE GODS 

wonderful these lines seem read in the light of present 
world conditions : 

"For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see. 

Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder thai 
would be. 

Saw the heaven filled with commerce, argosies of magic 
sails, 

Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly- 
bales ; 

Heard the heavens filled with shouting, and there rained a 
ghastly dew 

From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue ; 

Far along the world wide whisper of the south wind rush- 
ing warm, 

With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the 
thunder storm; 

Till the war drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle flags 
were furl'd 

In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the world. 

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm 
in awe. 

And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law." 

And how still more wonderful seem these lines of the 
old Hebrew prophet written over two thousand years 
before Tennyson: 

''And he will judge between the nations, and will 
decide concerning many peoples; and they shall beat 
their swords into plowshares and their spears into 
pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against 
nation, neither shall they learn war any more." 

It is, of course, natural that there should still re- 
main a few sceptics in regard to the new world order. 
One of my friends, who is a member of an organisa- 
tion which is doing its best to militarise and thereby 
to Prussianise its native land, belongs to this number. 
He said to me some while ago that any kind of asso- 

[187] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

ciation of nations is all nonsense, that there have always 
been wars and they will continue to exist, that those 
who argue otherwise are dreamers and are not to be 
taken too seriously. After hearing a good deal of 
this kind of talk, I disposed of him by reading to him 
the following resolution of the Lancaster, Ohio, school 
board passed in 1828, in answer to a request for the 
use of the schoolhouse for a debate on the practica- 
bility of railroads : 

"You are welcome to use the schoolroom to debate 
all proper questions in, but such things as railroads and 
telegraphs are impossibilities and rank infidelity. 
There is nothing in the Word of God about them. If 
God had designed that his intelligent creatures should 
travel at the frightful speed of fifteen miles an hour 
by steam, he would have foretold it through His holy 
prophets. It is a device of Satan to lead immortal 
souls down to hell." 

"Now," I said to him, "you are worse than the 
Lancaster, Ohio, school board, for they only objected 
to the era of railroads and telegraphs because they 
thought such an era had not been prophesied in the 
Bible. But this new era of internationalism has been 
prophesied in the Bible and standing on the very 
threshold of it, you still refuse to believe in its ap- 
pearance." 

This is the new age upon which we are entering and 
no culture is worthy of such an age save a culture 
which incarnates the spirit of the prophets and dream- 
ers who in the darkness of the past foresaw the glories 
of the coming dawn. It is fitting, too, that the celebra- 

[188] 



THE DEATH OF THE GODS 

tion of the day which history will record as initiating 
this new order should interpret and emphasise the 
destruction of the old tribal gods of the past, to the 
end that mankind might be free to worship and to 
serve the True and Living God of the future ! 



[189] 



XVI 

GRATITUDE, TRUE AND FALSE 

(A Thanksgiving Sermon) 

TEXT: Luke i8:ii. "God, I thank thee." 

THE custom of Thanksgiving is very old. The 
idea of setting apart a special day for returning 
thanks to the Deity goes back to the most primitive 
times. The Egyptians, Jews, Greeks and Romans all 
held festivals and various religious exercises devoted 
to the idea of Thanksgiving. The Hellenic goddess 
of the harvest, Demeter, was supposed to preside over 
the Greek Thanksgiving day; while the Latin goddess 
of nature, Ceres, occupied a similar position in the 
religious life of the Romans. Throughout European 
history, we read of days specially set apart as times of 
rejoicing over victories and as occasions of special 
Thanksgiving. It was in fact the usual thing for the 
church to consecrate a certain number of days during 
the year to fasting, thanksgiving and prayer. During 
the reign of Elizabeth in England, many such occa- 
sions are noted. An especially well-known thanksgiv- 
ing day and probably one which had decided influence 
in helping to establish our own celebration was the 
one observed in Leyden, Holland, on October third. 
This date commemorated the raising of the siege of 

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GRATITUDE, TRUE AND FALSE 

the city by the Spaniards in 1575. The fact that many 
of the Pilgrim fathers had lived in Holland and that 
they established the Thanksgiving custom less than 
fifty years after the siege of Ley den would seem to 
indicate that the well-known Holland festival furnished 
the immediate prototype for its American successor. 

There are three thanksgiving days in American his- 
tory which stand out with especial pre-eminence. First, 
the thanksgiving of the Pilgrims at Plymouth in No- 
vember, 1 62 1, when the colonists gave thanks for the 
harvest they had garnered after a year of the most 
extreme suffering and hardships. Second, the first 
national thanksgiving day observed on November 26, 
1789, by proclamation of Washington. Third, the 
thanksgiving day of November, 1863, established by 
Abraham Lincoln, and since his time observed as an 
annual festival. Previous to the Lincobi proclamation, 
Thanksgiving day had been observed upon exceptional 
occasions only; but since 1863 it has been the uniform 
practice of our chief executives to call the people to- 
gether for thanksgiving and prayer on the last Thurs- 
day in November of every year. There are certain 
passages in the proclamation of Lincoln which are 
worth remembering. Among other things he says: 

"The year that is drawing toward its close has been 
filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful 
skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly en- 
joyed that we are prone to forget the source from 
which they come, others have been added which are 
of so extraordinary nature that they cannot fail to 
penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually 
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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty 
God. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any- 
mortal hand worked out these great things. They are 
the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while 
dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath neverthe- 
less remembered mercy." 

I. True Verstis False Thanksgiving, 

The text which has been selected for our considera- 
tion will doubtless appear out of place to many. It is 
a portion of the well-known prayer of the Pharisee 
contained in Christ's parable of the Pharisee and the 
publican as narrated in the Gospel of Luke. It has 
been selected as the basis of this sermon because it 
stands out as pre-eminently typical of a form of thanks- 
giving which is unfortunately far from rare in human 
history. Like all other religious customs, thanksgiving 
tends to become a formality and very often we assume, 
albeit unconsciously, the Pharisaical attitude. It is diffi- 
cult to preserve the spirit of genuine gratitude so long 
as our attention is centred upon the acquirement of 
material advantages or the building up of a fortune 
or even a competency for ourselves. The great fault 
about the prayer of the Pharisee was that it had no 
touch of unselfishness in it. The man was proud of his 
gains, proud of his character, proud of his standing in 
the community, proud of his intellectual ability, in 
short, his attitude reflected the acme of selfish satis- 
faction. 

As a nation and as individuals, we need constantly 
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GRATITUDE, TRUE AND FALSE 

to examine ourselves to see whether our thanksgiving 
is true and genuine, or whether we have gravitated, at 
least, toward the hypocritical gratitude of the Pharisee. 
It is to such an examination that we are called to-day. 
In order to enter into it in the proper sort of way, it 
is necessary that we should understand fully the issues 
which are involved. 

II. False Thanksgiving — The Test. 

The test of Pharisaical thanksgiving is the posses- 
sion of a fundamentally selfish attitude. Whenever we 
feel that we are better than others and that our own 
goodness makes us immune so far as responsibility for 
helping others is concerned, we are putting ourselves 
in a position to pray like the Pharisee. There was 
perhaps never a time in the history of our nation when 
we were more tempted to take this attitude than we are 
to-day. Beyond any question, we are far and away the 
richest nation on earth. From the standpoint of mili- 
tary prowess, we have replaced Germany in the 
thought of the world. Our people have better educa- 
tional facihties, greater material comforts and greater 
opportunities for advancement than are enjoyed by any 
other people on the globe. We complain about taxes 
and the burdens of war, but the fact is that in compari- 
son with other civilised nations we are fortunate be- 
yond calculation. Our debt per capita is only a small 
fraction of the staggering burden which the war has 
imposed upon other and less fortunate nations. 

Under circumstances such as these, there is great 
[193] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

temptation for us to rejoice in our own good fortune 
and to thank God that we are not like the others. The 
fruitage of such an attitude is found in our unwilling- 
ness to risk any comfort or convenience in order to 
help our neighbours. During the earlier years of the 
war, the idealism of our people was challenged with the 
statement, almost universally heralded throughout the 
land, that we were engaged in an unselfish struggle to 
destroy militarism, to make the world safe for democ- 
racy, and to drive the spirit of war from the globe 
forever. If there were those who did not believe in 
these idealistic pronouncements, they said nothing 
about their doubts. Any one who was familiar with 
the general attitude of the people cannot dispute the 
fact that during the earlier days of the war the public, 
as a whole, was appealed to almost entirely from the 
standpoint of imselfish and idealistic considerations. 
Moreover, the response to such appeals was enthusias- 
tic and overwhelming. 

Now, however, we are told that we went into the war 
to save our own skins and that our motives were cold- 
bloodedly selfish. By the same token, we are in- 
structed to look out for our own interests in all mat- 
ters pertaining to world reconstruction, regardless of 
what may happen to the rest of humanity. We are to 
thank God that the Atlantic separated us, in large 
measure, from the world conflagration, and we are to 
take care to use to the fullest the advantage which our 
good fortune has given us in the game of world poli- 
tics. If we listen to our counsellors who argue after 
this fashion, it will mean that we will be pilloried 

[194] 



GRATITUDE, TRUE AND FALSE 

before the world as the Pharisee of the nations. Even 
before the war, our love of money and the atmosphere 
of materialism which surrounded our national life gave 
our pretensions of religion and virtue a Pharisaical 
cast in the eyes of many other peoples. We cannot 
afford to confirm such impressions by assuming the 
selfish attitude at this crisis in world history. 

III. The Danger of False Thanksgiving. 

Both from the national and from the individual view- 
point, we face no greater danger than is involved in 
the keynote of this sermon. We have many virtues, 
as a people, and we have many things of which we may 
well be proud. So had the Pharisee. There is no 
question but that he was, extertially at least, a rather 
exceptionally decent character. The Biblical account 
of his prayer in no way impeaches the accuracy of his 
statements concerning his own virtues. At a time when 
most people were grossly derelict with regard to the 
moral law, he could say, no doubt truthfully, that he 
was not like the common crowd. He did not steal, 
he did not cheat, he was clean in his personal life, he 
did not even engage in shady transactions like the 
publican beneath his feet. Moreover, his virtues were 
by no means negative. He fasted twice a week and he 
contributed regularly of his earthly goods to the church. 
What more can America say of herself? We are ac- 
customed to a good deal of self-praise in the matter of 
our national history. Probably we are better off than 
most other nations, but we do not have too much of 

[195] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

which to boast. For one thing, we are still in our 
infancy as compared with most of the others. By the 
testimony of our own historians, there are certain fea- 
tures, connected with at least one of our wars, which 
will not stand too much scrutiny. Our recent diplo^ 
matic dealings with the United States of Colombia will 
not help us in the eyes of people of other nations. Be- 
fore oil was discovered in large quantities in Colombia, 
we indignantly repudiated the claims for indemnity 
made upon us. We stood upon our honour and as- 
serted that to pay the amount asked for would mean a 
confession of national guilt in connection with the dig- 
ging of the Panama Canal. Some of our lawmakers 
were almost furious in their attacks upon their com- 
rades who would even suggest compromising our na- 
tional integrity by the payment of a single dollar under 
the circumstances mentioned. So matters stood until 
the news came that an oil field, rivalling the Tampico 
section, was in process of development in Colombia. 
Almost over night, our belligerent lawmakers had a 
change of heart. The national honour, in their judg- 
ment, ran no risk of being compromised by paying the 
indemnity to Colombia. Notwithstanding the pressure 
of after-war obligations and the desire to placate the 
people, hungry for tax relief, the twenty-five million 
indemnity passed our Congress by an overwhelming 
majority. 

The Colombia incident is but one out of numerous 
examples of the influence of monetary consideration 
in shaping our national policies. It is this sort of 
thing which has made America synonymous with the 

[196] 



GRATITUDE, TRUE AND FALSE 

worship of money in the eyes of citizens of other 
nations. The contributions made through the Hoover 
Relief Committees, and in other ways, have helped to 
change this impression ; but after all we have given so 
little in comparison with what we could give and ought 
to give that the more unpleasant criticism still remains. 

IV. The Nature of True Thanksgiving. 

We need the attitude of the publican, rather than the 
attitude of the Pharisee, as we approach our day of 
national thanksgiving. In the face of our responsibili- 
ties to the world, we should be humble jinstead of 
assuming the attitude of self-righteousness. There are 
so many outstretched hands from the needy ones of 
the world that, until they are filled, we should have 
little cause for self-gratulation. It is useless for us 
to pride ourselves upon our superior virtue or our 
superior wealth so long as we do not use these gifts 
to better the condition of others. After all, whatever 
superiority may be ours at this time is largely the 
result of chance and not of any merit of our own. If 
we really possess the spirit of thanksgiving, we ought 
to show that spirit by whole-hearted sacrifice in the 
interest of our neighbours. 

If we hearken to our jingo press and to a certain 
type of political leadership which always appeals to 
selfish and immediate interests, our thanksgiving prayer 
to-day will be something like this : "God, I thank thee 
that we are not extortioners, like the Germans, nor un- 
just, like the English, nor unclean, like the Japanese, 
nor even like this publican which we call Soviet 

[197] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

Russia. We Americans go to church more than the 
rest; we do not exactly give tithes, but we contribute, 
at least a portion of our wealth, to religion; and we 
have even given a small fraction of what we spend 
every year in trivial amusements to the starving people 
across the seas who are constantly begging us for 
relief." 

I wonder whether we are ready to assume this atti- 
tude or whether we are not ready to say something like 
this: "Lord, we are richer than any other people; we 
have natural advantages which make us exceptionally 
favoured among the nations ; we are a great common- 
wealth and we have in our hands the power to do 
almost anything for world betterment that we may 
desire. In spite of all these gifts, gifts which we ac- 
knowledge come from Thee, we have done almost noth- 
ing to relieve the suffering and want of other and less 
favoured peoples. We claim to be a Christian nation, 
but we have made no attempt to practise the teachings 
of Christ in our dealings with others. As we think 
of our obligations and the pitiably inadequate manner 
in which we have fulfilled them, there is only one 
prayer which fits our condition and that is the prayer 
of the publican, God, be merciful to us for we are 
sinners." 

Surely upon an occasion such as this, we can do no 
better than recall those words of Kipling in "The 
Recessional" : 

"If drunk with sight of power, we loose 
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe. 
Such boasting as the Gentiles use 
Or lesser breeds without the law — 

[198] 



GRATITUDE, TRUE AND FALSE 

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, 
Lest we forget — lest we forget !" 

■'For heathen heart that puts her trust 
In reeking tube and iron shard, 

All valiant dust that builds on dust. 
And guarding calls not Thee to guard, 

For frantic boast and foolish word, 

Thy mercy on Thy people, Lord!" 



[199] 



XVII 

THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING; AS RELATED TO THE 
INCARNATION 

(A Christmas Sermon) 
TEXT: John 3:16. "For God so loved the world." 

IN that masterpiece of language and thought spring- 
ing out of the birth-throes of what was really a 
great soul, the book entitled "De Profundis" written 
by Oscar Wilde while a prisoner in Reading Gaol, there 
is a sentence something like this, "There is enough 
suffering in one narrow London lane to show that God 
does not love man, and wherever there is any sorrow, 
though but that of a child in some little garden weeping 
over a fault that it has or has not committed, the whole 
face of creation is completely marred." 

I. The Problem Stated. 

It is true that Wilde reverses his verdict a little later 
in the book, but the striking power of the illustration 
remains the same. The hardest thing in the world for 
me to believe is the fact of the goodness of God. The 
most difficult text in the Bible to explain is the state- 
ment that "God so loved the world." I do not find it 
difficult personally to believe in a miracle. Life itself 

[200] 



THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 

is the supreme miracle, and I am sure of life, but to 
stand in the presence of the awful wretchedness, misery/ 
and wrong of the world and then to say that the Being 
who made all this loved it and loved man ; this is hard 
to understand. I wonder if that Cincinnati mother 
understood it of whom the papers told a few years ago. 
Out of work; a widow, with three small mouths to 
feed and nothing to feed them, after struggling with 
her agony for days, she at last takes the lives of her 
children to spare them further pain, and then her own. 
As her starving, agonised gaze looked up through her 
garret window into the bleak, unpitying heavens, there 
must have been something in her approaching the 
Divine if she could believe in a loving God. Surely 
one life like hers will weigh down much of the smug 
and self-complacent optimism of the classes which let 
her starve. 

No one can pursue in the slightest measure the 
study of anthropology, the science of man, or of 
archaeology, the science of everything that is old, with- 
out being impressed with the heartlessly brutal char- 
acter of the early peoples from whom we have sprung. 
There is a sort of grim, fantastic horror about those 
old Assyrian tablets immortalised in the prosaic and 
dingy courts of the British Museum. One sees people 
being burned alive and impaled and flayed and having 
their eyes put out on every side. And the Assyrians 
were the cultured people of the older days. Of the 
barbarity of the early stages of the world's history, it 
is almost impossible to conceive. When one reflects 
that crucifixion was the legalised punishment of the 
[201] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

most civilised nation of the world for nearly a thou- 
sand years, he can form some faint idea of what took 
place in barbarous lands. 

To the student of biology, no less than the anthro- 
pologist or the archaeologist, the problem seems to 
present insuperable difficulties. It is not that we find 
exceptional cases of cruelty, murder, and lust as we go 
back farther and farther in our study of the various 
forms of life, but rather that life itself seems based 
upon an utter indifference to these things. The strug- 
gle for existence means simply that the strong have 
always conquered the weak ; that the unpitying arm of 
might has always prevailed. Out of an innumerable 
offspring. Nature selects the few strongest types and 
bids the rest perish from her sight. It is little wonder 
that Professor Haeckel should style the process an 
immoral one, and should laugh at the idea of there 
being either duty or love back of the universe. 

Much that is in our present day civilisation presents 
a similar antinomy. It is only the shallow thinker, the 
man or the woman whose butterfly existence has never 
probed the heart of things who can look at the world 
even as it is to-day without a certain soberness of mien 
and even sadness of heart. I was much impressed a 
few years ago when I read that report of the Charity 
Organization Society of New York dealing with con- 
ditions of living among the labouring classes in the city 
of Pittsburgh. One reads of the almost certain doom 
of labourers following various crafts for a livelihood ; 
of work so exceedingly deadly that no form of protec- 
tive insurance has yet been able to be devised, however 

[202] 



THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 

high the rate imposed; of tenement houses owned by a 
corporation with a capital stock of over a billion dol- 
lars, and yet of which, to quote the exact language of 
the report, "for us to have found a more humanly de- 
structive group of bad houses would have been impos- 
sible." These labourers, doomed to slow death by con- 
sumption, often surrounded by families which they 
must leave uncared for, looking up with their last gaze 
into the wan faces of wife or child, left alone in the 
busy, pitiless world; these men, I say, may well cry 
out in agony of soul, "How can it be that the God who 
made us and made the world could have loved us?" 
One of the peculiarly striking experiences of my 
life, one which is still etched, as it were, with a sort 
of indelible acid upon my soul, is a scene which I wit- 
nessed during the first month of my ministry. I was 
summoned to the bedside of a woman dying of quick 
consumption. She wa^ young, not yet twenty. Her 
husband and one child, a little girl, would survive her. 
As I tried in the most quiet, sympathetic way I could 
command to comfort her in her wretchedness with the 
thought of God's love, she turned to me and whis- 
pered, for she could no longer speak aloud, "Does God 
love me ? Then why doesn't he help me ?" Somehow 
those words took the answer out of my lips. I could 
not help thinking of how utterly impossible it was for 
me, strong, vigorous, active, happy, to talk of God's 
love to her. I tried to put myself in her place, and 
wondered whether I would not see it in the same way, 
and often since that time, as I have passed along 
through the world, drinking its nectar and tasting its 

[203] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

manifold delights, suddenly a pale, wan face comes 
before me and a quick, feverish whisper says again, 
"Does God love me? Then why doesn't he help me?" 
In the face of these problems, the statement of 
Christianity that God is love appears so strange and 
paradoxical that it demands an explanation. If God 
loves the world, surely his has been a strange way of 
showing his love. Strange love, which tortures its 
own children, which condemns them pitilessly to rack 
and faggot and cross, which dooms them to days of 
wretchedness and nights of tears, to misery of body 
and despair of soul, to poverty and grief and misery 
and distress and want. Strange love, indeed. And if 
this be God's, the very best that can be said of it is 
that it is not like our own. 

II. The Problem Solved Through the Incarnation. 

Is there, then, any way of understanding how God 
can love the world in the face of all these things? 
There is a great saying in the Gospel of John, per- 
haps the most familiar saying in the Bible, "For God 
so loved the world that he gave his only begotten 
Son." I do not believe that the full significance of 
those words is often appreciated. They furnish to me 
the one and only solution of the problem of world 
suffering and sorrow. There was a time in my reli- 
gious development when the idea of the deity of Christ 
seemed like an inexplicable thing. It seemed almost 
irreverent to me, as it always seemed to the Greeks, 
that God himself should die upon the cross. That God 

[204] 



THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 

should suffer bitter torture at the hands of his own 
creatures seemed like an unthinkable, almost a hideous 
thing. As I have thought deeper, however, into the 
heart of the world problem, I have come to realise that 
the only possible solution of the eternal mystery lies 
precisely in the cross. If God who made the world 
with its misery is willing himself to share that misery, 
nay sound it to its very depths, then after all he may 
have loved the thing he made. A general may seem 
harsh and cruel to his soldiers when he orders them on 
forced marches and exposes them to bitter privation, 
but when he himself goes down into the ranks and 
suffers with them and shares the bitterest lot they have 
to share, then they come to realise that the harsh orders 
were given for a purpose and that after all their gen- 
eral cares for them and loves them. And so in the 
suffering Saviour I discern a suffering God. In the 
last bitter agony of Gethsemane and Calvary I see 
God voluntarily enduring all the misery his creatures 
have to endure, draining their bitterest cup to the 
dregs just in order to show them that however they 
may misunderstand his universe, he yet loves them 
with an infinite love. 

The atonement thus becomes not the old and to me 
impossible idea of Christ atoning to God for the sins 
of the world, but it becomes rather the new and mag- 
nificently sublime idea of God atoning to the world for 
whatever suffering their creation may have brought 
upon His people. It is for this reason that the divinity 
of Christ becomes so necessary in the Christian econ- 
omyi Take it away, and the whole world problem is 
[205] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

an insoluble mystery; grant it, and light illumines the 
gloom. I frankly confess that there is no escape from 
pessimism for me except through the cross. The God 
who made the world is either a heartless God or he is 
Christ. No man who thinks things through can reach 
any other conclusion. "God so loved the world that 
he gave his only begotten son" are the key words which 
unlock the riddle of the universe. 

III. A Further Problem — Why Suffering at All? 

But having reached at least some solution of the 
great mystery through the cross, there arises another 
problem which demands an answer. Why, it may be 
asked, is there any need at all for suffering? Why 
could there not have been a world in which neither the 
Creator nor his creatures would need to suffer? 
Could not the Almighty by a single touch of His om- 
nipotent hand or a single word from his life-giving 
lips have breathed into existence a universe where sor- 
row should be unknown and where sadness should die 
still-born and never see the light? Could not the 
Omnipotent have made roses without thorns, pleasure 
without pain, and innocence without a suspicion of 
guilt ? One answer to these questions, it seems to me, 
must forever silence criticism. The cross proves the 
existence of Omnipotent Love, and Omnipotent Love 
has not made a thomless universe. Therefore it could 
not be made without sacrificing something greater in 
order to secure it. Everything in life points to some- 
thing higher than mere feeling values. Pleasure is 

[206] 



THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 

good and pain bad, but pleasure is neither the highest 
good nor is pain the greatest evil. The supreme values 
are character values and these are often independent 
of either pleasure or pain. Somehow we feel that the 
good life must be ultimately the happy life, but it is 
only ultimately that it becomes so, and before the goal 
is reached much of pain must enter into the process. 

This truth, so hard for us to believe, or to under- 
stand, has always received the approval of the great 
and the good of the world. The supreme genius of 
William Shakespeare recognised it as the result of 
the painful travail of many years. Shakespeare in his 
youth delighted in characters of sunny temper and 
cloudless smiles, in maidens like the fair-browed Rosa- 
lind or the witty Beatrice dwelling in a fairy land of 
ambrosial raptures and with hearts untouched by a 
single scar. But out of the crucible of the sonnet 
years came forth the riper testimony of the seer. 
Bitter indeed are the crucifixions of Hamlet and 
Othello and Lear, terrible are the martyrdoms of the 
saints who stepped forth aureole-crowned from their 
pages to take their places in the Pantheon of fame. 
And yet these characters : Cordelia, Desdemona, Ham- 
let, we recognise at once as the supreme monument of 
the poet's genius and power. Surely had Shakespeare 
created a world, he would not have made it a thornless 
one. With him, too, the supreme values are character 
values, and these are always wrought out of the fur- 
nace of pain. 

In the book from which I quoted at the beginning 
of this sermon, the "De Profundis" of Oscar Wilde, 
[207] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

there is a similar testimony. Wilde acknowledges that 
he, like Shakespeare, and I suppose like every one 
else, for many years •could not understand the strange 
combination of love«and suffering in the world. But 
later through much tribulation and tears, he reaches 
a truer view of things. *'Now," he says, *'it seems 
to me that love of some kind is the only possible ex- 
planation of the extraordinary amount of suffering 
there is in the world. "I am convinced," he continues, 
"that there is no other explanation and that if the 
world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, 
it has been built by the hands of love because in no 
other way could the soul of man for whom the world 
was made reach the full stature of its perfection. 
Pleasure for the beautiful body, but pain for the beau- 
tiful soul.'* 

IV. The True Optimism. 

So it is that we come with chastened speech and 
trembling lips by the way that leads to Golgotha over 
into the eternal kingdom of the blessed life. Through 
tears of shame and agonies of humiliation we grope 
our way upward to the stars. We kiss the rod, know- 
ing that its keenest sting comes from the very heart 
of God. Through boundless faith and endless hope 
we press onward to the courts of love. Yes, had God 
made everything easy for us, how little indeed had he 
loved us ! 

And yet while we realise the truthfulness of these 
things, it is still hard to cling to them. As another 

[208] 



THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 

has said, "Far off, like a perfect pearl one can see the 
city of God. It is so wonderful that it seems as if a 
child could reach it in a summer day. But with us it 
is so hard to hold heights that the soul is competent 
to gain. Yet must we keep our faces set toward the 
gate which is called beautiful though we fall many 
times and often in the mist go astray." It is much, 
I take it, after all, to have had the vision even though 
at times it fades away. It is much to be able when we 
think our best to see love at the heart of the world. 
It is much to see the glory of God in those twilight 
reveries of thought which help us to peer for a mo- 
ment across the bar and into the infinite beyond. As 
Whittier has said, 

"The clouds that rise, with thunders slake 
Our thirsty souls with rain; 
The blow most dreaded falls to break 
From off our limbs a chain, 
And wrongs of man to man but make 
The love of God more plain, 
As through the shadowy lens of even 
The eye looks farthest into heaven, 
One dreams of stars and depths of blue 
The glaring sunshine never knew." 

If moral, that is to say ideal, values are alone worth 
while in the world, and if in order to secure them pain 
and suffering must needs be endured, then after all 
there is a firm and solid basis for the only optimism 
that is worth while, — the optimism which does not 
dodge difficulties, but which faces them through to 
the end. This is the optimism of Cordelia, of Desde- 
mona, of Hamlet, of Rabbi ben Ezra, and of Saul. 
Browning, like Fichte, and like Paul, even rejoices in 
[209] 



^ SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

tribulations, seeing in them the only possible means of 
reaching the higher goal. In that vigorous, almost 
super-robust style which has made him famous, he: 

"Welcomes each rebuff that turns earth's smoothness rough; 
That bids nor stand nor sit, but go; 
Be our joys three parts pain, 
Strive and hold cheap the strain, 
Learn, nor account the pang ; dare, never grudge the throe." 

Perhaps some of us with less physical vigour than 
Browning and a more contemplative and sober turn 
of mind may find an easier truth in the simpler, though 
no less charming words of Whitcomb Riley: 

"O, the rain and the sun, and the sun and the rain ! 
When the tempest is done, then the sun-shine again. 
And in rapture we'll ride through the stormiest gales, 
For God's hand's on the helm and his breath's in the sails. 
Then murmur no more in lull or in roar, 
But smile and be brave, till the voyage is o'er." 

Yes, of a truth, whether it seems quite true to us 
at all times or not, the Lord is our Shepherd. He leads 
us through the parched desert sometimes no less than 
by the still waters, but always he leads us on. Before 
us is the cup which runneth over; the table loaded 
with bounties; the stillness and peace of the Father's 
presence forever. The same John who wrote "For 
God so loved the world" wrote also on the Isle of 
Patmos, as he gazed upon the glorious host of the 
redeemed, "These are they who have come up out of 
great tribulation and have washed their robes and 
made them white in the blood of the Lamb." 

"Once in every man's life," says Oscar Wilde, "he 
[210] 



THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 

walks with Christ to Emmaus." Shall we not walk 
with Him as we leave this house on the day sacred to 
His Incarnation and to his glorious advent in the 
world ! 



[211] 



XVIII 

THE END OF THE HARVEST 

(Sermon for the Last Day of the Year) 

TEXT: Jer. 8:20. "The harvest is past, the summer is 
ended, and we are not saved." 

IN a few more hours, the current year will have 
passed into history. There is something solemn 
about the moment of death, be it only the death of the 
year. As the minutes slowly tick away, something is 
passing which will never return again. The old year 
is dying. Spring with her garlands of roses will deck 
his brow no more ; Summer with her rich fruitage and 
harvest has gone forever; Autumn's golden haze is a 
thing of the past. Peace be to the dying year. We 
consign him to the earth, and with a tear for those who 
have died with him and who were near and dear to us, 
we pronounce the words, "earth to earth, dust to dust, 
ashes to ashes," and with bowed heads we pass from 
his grave. 

Some of us will recall with what hopes and ambitions 
the year which is now dying began. How we dreamed 
of this or the other thing which should be achieved 
before it closed; how we said to ourselves, "when the 
dawn of another year comes, I shall be thus much 
richer, or better, or happier than I am to-day." And 

[212] 



THE END OF THE HARVEST 

to-night we strike the balance and find out how far we 
have succeeded in our expectations. For most of us 
at least, some things have not been realised. Unex- 
pected disappointments have come, those accidents of 
fortune which seem impossible to foresee or to avoid — 
death, disease, something which smote the sinews of 
our arms and made it impossible for us to reach the 
goal. Or it may be, that our own carelessness or indo- 
lence, or lack of energy, or all of them put together, 
were responsible for the failure. 

As we look back upon the past, perhaps we can see 
mistakes which might have been avoided, bits of blun- 
dering and folly, that tripped our feet and hurled us 
headlong, things which we ought to have seen but failed 
to see, thorns which prick all the more bitterly to-night 
because there might have been roses in their place. 
How we wish we could unsay the harsh word which 
caused so much trouble for us or for others, or undo 
the rash action, the consequences of which were so 
much more serious than we anticipated. Whatever 
the cause, now that our time is up, we recognise the 
failure. With that instinct of hopefulness which is 
the mainstay of life, we say that what we failed to do 
during the last year, we shall do during the year to 
come. But this is an impossibility. We may do some- 
thing like what we purposed for the past year, but we 
shall not achieve the past purpose itself. The oppor- 
tunity to do that closed with the year. However suc- 
cessful the future may be, the failures of the past can- 
not be wiped out; they remain failures and shall so 
remain until the crash of doom. The books have been 

[213] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

closed; the account has been balanced; the time for 
payment has expired; we are declared defaulters for 
the year. 

I. The Lesson of the Year, the Lesson of Life, 

What is true of the past year, will be true of each of 
our lives, in greater or less proportion. As the account 
for this year in a few hours will be made up ; so, some 
day, just when neither you nor the angels in heaven 
know, the account for your life will be made up; the 
books will be closed, and however much you may de- 
sire to undo the past or unmake a record already made, 
your efforts will be fruitless and vain. 

The words of the text refer to just such a regretful 
survey on the part of a nation which had neglected 
opportunities until they had passed forever. From 
his place as a prophet in the dying agonies of the 
idolatrous kingdom of Judah, looking forward to the 
years of captivity near at hand, above all, to that 
destruction of national freedom which should never 
terminate, in tones of bitter regret, Jeremiah pro- 
nounces the fateful words, "the harvest is past, the 
summer is ended, and we are not saved." In one short 
sentence, he summarises the doom of his people. No 
other words could convey quite so well the hopelessness 
of their fate. "The harvest is past." "The opportu- 
nities for work and service have flown." "The sum- 
mer is ended." The time in which we may work is no 
more. Life presents just these two conditions out of 
which we must all mould our fates : these two and no 

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THE END OF THE HARVEST 

more. Let us note briefly just what each of them 
means to you and to me, no less than what they meant 
to Jeremiah or to Judah. 



II. The Meafdng of the Harvest, 

First then, let us observe that the harvest is a 
period for the display of strength and energy. Some 
years ago, Doctor William Osier, Regius Professor of 
Medicine in Oxford University, caused a great sensa- 
tion by his statement that after forty years of age a 
man's opportunities, so far as originating anything, 
great or useful in the world are practically at an end. 
There was much harsh criticism of a pronouncement 
which was very largely misunderstood. Doctor Osier 
did not mean that old people were useless, or of no 
value, or that they ought to be put out of the road; 
as some editors and magazine writers tried to make us 
believe. What he meant was, that there are ten or 
twenty years in a man's life when his faculties are all 
at their best; when his nenres are strongest and his 
brain clearest; when his memory is unclouded and his 
will firm. If he dilly-dallies with opportunities during 
these years; if he puts off doing anything worthwhile 
until his old age ; when old age comes, it will not meet 
his expectations. There is a time for harvest, a time 
to thrust in the sickle and to bind up the sheaves. Let 
the harvest time pass by, and the crop, whatever it 
may be, is ruined forever. By and by, the muscles 
will become weaker; the nerves less firm; the limbs 
unsteady, and harvest time will be almost over. What 
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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

kind of sheaves are we bearing with us as we totter 
out of this world into the next? Are they sheaves of 
golden grain, which will stand the test of the flail, or 
are they tares worthy only of being burned ? 

III. Harvest, a Period of Opportunity, 

Again, I observe, that the harvest season is a period 
of opportunity. We are given strength and ability to 
garner the grain and we are also given grain to garner. 
It would be useless to try to number or to name the 
various opportunities which are ours. This world is 
a tremendous harvest field with all kinds of grain ready 
to be garnered. There are sections labelled "Wealth," 
"Pleasure," "Ambition," "Power," and the like. The 
most important of all is the harvest of the future. 
"Shall I live for the Now, or for the Hereafter?" is 
the most significant question before any human being. 
By and by the time will come when choosing will be no 
longer possible. Then I shall have leisure for regret 
but for nothing more. To-day is the harvest period. 

Not long ago, a young girl in one of our eastern 
cities shot and killed the man who was about to desert 
her and then committed suicide. In the letter which 
she left behind her, she stated that she had at one time 
been a member of one of the oldest churches in the 
city in which she lived. One line of the letter was sin- 
gularly pathetic : "Do not tell my mother," she wrote, 
"what an awful failure her daughter has made of life." 
A few years before, the world with all its countless 
opportunities was hers: it was her time for harvest. 

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THE END OF THE HARVEST 

Out of the numberless paths before her, she chose one 
that led downward; soon her harvest was ended; and 
what a harvest it was with which to enter eternity! 

Why is it that people regret so bitterly the mistaken 
lives of the past? The career is ended. For better 
or worse, the history has been written. There is noth- 
ing more now that can be done : why then, lament and 
weep over the impossible? Is not the reason found in 
the fact that we all recognise when too late, how per- 
fectly easy it would have been for us to have achieved 
something different from what was the actual result of 
our efforts ? We see, when too late, how easy it would 
have been, if we had cared to have it so for us to have 
become another man or another woman from what we 
are. Why is it that with our shrivelled sheaves in our 
hands we shrink from facing the Master of the Har- 
vest? There are those who say that everything hap- 
pens just as it would have happened anyway, and if a 
man garners thistles instead of wheat, it is something 
that could not have been otherwise. But if this were 
true, no man would ever be afraid to stand before the 
judgment bar of God, and conscience and remorse and 
regret would become hideous mysteries impossible to 
explain. We may salve our souls, and justify our 
misdeeds with thoughts of the kind, but at the last 
they will not stand the test of the refiner's fire or the 
thresher's flail. The common sense of mankind brushes 
aside all such metaphysical sophistry. Man created in 
the image of God, can and does make or mar his own 
destiny. If we are lost, it is our own fault and we 
know it. Look back over the events of the past year ; 
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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

there is the blunder, we will say, that you made when 
you chose a certain bargain instead of another. Did 
you have to choose the one you did ? Somebody may 
try to argue you into that idea, but you know better, 
and it is because you know better that you hate to 
think of the blunder. 

What is true of a simple blunder, is very much more 
true of a crime. We feel regret for our blunders; we 
feel remorse for our sins. Moreover, what is true of 
a single action, or a single year, is very much more true 
of a lifetime. Some one has said that there ought to be 
no thinking done at the moment of death; the thinking 
should all be done beforehand. John Randolph, the 
great American statesman, in his last illness, said to his 
doctor : ^'Remorse ! remorse ! remorse ! Let me see the 
word ! show it to me in the dictionary !" There being 
none in the room, he said to the doctor: "Write it 
then." The doctor wrote in on both sides of the card, 
at Randolph's direction. It was then underlined, as he 
wished it. He gazed upon it, and then said: "Re- 
morse! You don't know what it means! you don't 
know what it means !" And so people may talk about 
the folly of saying that things could be otherwise than 
they are, as much as they please, but in the hour of 
death their own consciences contradict them. There 
was a certain philosopher who tried to argue Diogenes 
into the belief that motion is an illusion, and that rea- 
son proves it to be impossible. Diogenes listened to the 
argument and then got up and walked across the room. 
"What are you doing that for?" said his friend. "To 
prove to you that I can move whether motion is im- 

[218] 



THE END OF THE HARVEST 

possible or not," he replied. So men may argue them- 
selves into almost any state of mind, but before God 
and the Angel of Death their arguments fade away. 
The great facts of experience testify that conscience 
and remorse and regret are real, and actual, and de- 
pendent upon our own behaviour. To-day, the harvest 
field is open before us to choose whatever we will; 
to-morrow we can only approve or regret the choice we 
have made. Let us be careful, therefore, how we 
choose to-day. Opportunities fade away as strength 
becomes weaker. When both have gone, the harvest 
is over. If the harvest of the past year should be our 
life harvest, would the results be satisfactory to us? 
if not, why not? No man knows the measure of his 
days : it may yet be that this harvest shall be the har- 
vest of life for us. 

IV. Harvest and Time. 

The passing of the harvest constitutes one side of 
the text but there is another. Life not only means the 
use of strength and opportunities, but it also means 
time in which to use them. People sometimes say 
that they do not know what to do in order to while 
away time ; but if they possess any measure of strength 
or opportunity they are very silly persons to use such 
language. The wise man or the wise woman has not 
too much time, but rather too little. The days, the 
weeks, the months, the years, flit by in a whirlwind of 
motion, until at last our hands are crossed in death, 
and time for us is no more. The summer is ended, 

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SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

Very precious the hours become as they draw near the 
end. A rich Philadelphian, it is said, paid his physician 
at the rate of six thousand dollars an hour to keep him 
alive a few days longer, and he was scarcely more than 
half alive then. People have offered fabulous sums for 
a few hours more of life. While health continues and 
everything goes well, time may hang heavy on our 
hands, as we sometimes say, but that state of mind is 
not permanent. As the summer draws near the end, 
we see so many things to do, and so little time in which 
to do them. In the bright June days, we idled away 
the precious hours; we disregarded warnings and ad- 
monitions, but now we haven't a moment to attend to 
those things which we see are absolutely needful. Let 
no one despise Time, lest a moment come when he 
shall pray heaven and earth for only a day longer in 
which to attempt to rebuild his life. 

A metropolitan journal told the other day of a man 
who died in an eastern city, some years ago, leaving a 
fortune of eleven millions of dollars. On his death 
bed, he constantly gave expression to his remorse for 
what his conscience told him had been an illspent life : 
**If I could only live my life over again," he said, 
"if I could only be spared for a few years, I would give 
all the wealth I have amassed in a lifetime." High 
prices have been paid for various things in the history 
of the world, but nothing has brought a higher price 
than time. Is it not the part of wisdom to use it prop- 
erly when it is given you as God's gift free as the air 
of heaven? Precious is the gold with its power of 
purchasing the varied good things of life; precious is 

[220] 



THE END OF THE HARVEST 

the diamond with its star-like rays of never-dying 
lustre : precious are all of the numberless treasures of 
the world, but there is none of them so precious as the 
fleeting moments of time. The ticking of a watch is 
like the tolling of a bell. The sunset of a single day 
is but a prophecy of the sunset of life. The snows of 
winter which fall year after year upon the graves of 
those we loved in the village church-yard in mute but 
eloquent language speak to us of the passing of the 
summer time of our own lives. Soon for us, like 
them, the summer will have ended. Winter, bleak 
winter, will be upon us, and the night wherein no man 
can work. Shall the refrain of our lives be the mourn- 
ful refrain of Jeremiah : "the harvest is past, the sum- 
mer is ended, and we are not saved"? 

V. The Conclusion, 

We are not saved. Yes, that is the great and impor- 
tant feature of the whole sentence. Harvest, and sum- 
mer-time have existed for a purpose. We have not 
used them to that end. The broad fields so rich with 
precious grain, have invited us in vain. The course of 
our lives has been turned awry by our own free voli- 
tion. We all owe a three- fold duty in this world; a 
duty to God, a duty to our fellow-man, a duty to our- 
selves. We have slighted our duty to God; have re- 
fused allegiance to him; have rejected the offers of 
admission to his Kingdom. We have not lived for 
our fellow-men as we should have lived; there were 
cases where we could have shown our brotherhood and 

[221] 



SERMONS FOR SPECIAL DAYS 

did not do it; now it is all over, and the little money 
ive saved, it may be, as the result of our selfish policy, 
is not worth while. In the closing hours of life, the 
thought of unselfish goodness is sweet to the soul : in 
those moments, we do not remember our sharp strokes 
of diplomacy, but rather our strokes that were more 
honest and not quite so sharp. It is in that hour that 
the man who has been cheated more than evens up with 
the man who has cheated him. Failing in our duty 
to God, and to our fellow-man, we cannot but have 
failed in our duty to our own higher selves. It is a 
strange sort of truth, but none the less a very clear one 
that the man who thinks only of his own self never has 
a self worth thinking of. We have despised God; we 
have been uncharitable to man, all for the sake of self, 
and now we have a self that is afraid to face the judg- 
ment. There is something sadly pathetic about the 
negative ring of the words : "we are not saved." How 
easy, during the harvest times, to have kept the "not" 
out of the sentence : how impossible to take it out now 
that the harvest is past. 

I have often thought that the saddest of all things in 
this world are the things that we miss, the things we 
lose; not the terrible battles we have to_face, not the 
conflicts of body or of soul, but the might-have-beens 
that are not ; the paradises which, by our own deliberate 
folly, we threw away. Like shadows we pass from 
this world into the next; our life is but a vapour which 
fleeth away. "In the morning we are like grass which 
groweth up. In the morning it flourisheth, and grow- 
eth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth." 

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THE END OF THE HARVEST 

The harvest is not for long, if every opportunity is 
seized; the summer is soon ended, even though we do 
not waste a day. But for us who neglect the oppor- 
tunities and let the days pass by unheeded, some time, 
when too late, there shall come the refrain of Jeremiah: 
"The harvest is passed, the summer is ended, and we 
are not saved." 



THE END 



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